Description
The the indispensable guide to the life and work of Don Maclennan - one of South Africa’s most incisive and important poets of the last few decades. No one who encountered Don Maclennan (1929-2009) during the more than three decades of his teaching career at Rhodes University is likely to forget the piercing appraisal of his blue eyes, the penetration of his questions, or the incisiveness of his opinions. He eventually largely eschewed the pretensions of academic publishing. His favoured medium became the short, pithy talk, rich with original aphorisms on the value of story and poem, and laden with quotations from his favourite writers. And of course poetry. Don published or printed some twenty volumes of poetry, increasingly spare and lapidary, increasingly concerned with his approaching death. Though sometimes disturbing, they above all celebrated the simple fact of being alive, being in love, being sensuous. He knew that there is “no other world” than this one. There is probably no poetry in South Africa’s national oeuvre more thoughtfully authentic than his.
