Description
Book SynopsisOffers a tender, tangled account of the heady days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela's release from prison. This award-winning poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in ""the new, intricate country / we understood was impossible.
Trade ReviewBaderoon’s poetry . . . uses a gentle eye to consider all that is intimate between us, and in doing so, renders these quiet and still moments as sacred. In
The History of Intimacy, she has rendered our most painful histories through an unobtrusive lens. She has written them with care, and left space and silence around them, so they (and we) may have room to breathe. In the act of listening, we render them sacred, and might begin to heal." —Toni Giselle Stuart,
The Johannesburg Review of Books". . . Baderoon’s poetry does not shy away from attempting to forge an understanding, on a broader political scale and in the intimacy of our souls." —Karina Magdalena Szczurek,
LitNet"South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of verse impresses with its concision of language and clarity of ideas. With subjects ranging from the hidden tableaus of her personal history to the meaning and value of poetry, Baderoon’s verses invite the reader to join her on an exploration of history, culture, and the universal qualities of the subjective experience." —
World Literature TodayTable of Contents
- Poetry for Beginners
- Tell Me What You See
- A Prospect of Beauty
- Closer
- Surface
- Focal Length
- Axis and Revolution
- Rain fall on the abstract world
- Port Jackson, Cape Town
- The Port Cities
- The River Cities
- Everything We've Said
- Diving
- Concentration
- Promised land
- Koggelbaai
- The Blue of the Night before We Left
- Ghost Technologies
- Song of the Husband 2
- The Flats
- Black Butterflies
- Green pincushion proteas
- Effective Immediately
- The Edges of Things
- Hangklip*
- The Word
- No Name
- Not You
- I saw you walk toward something
- The History of Intimacy
- Answering
- The Law of the Mother
- Cardinal Points
- Glossary
