Search results for ""Author Dan Wylie""

Don Maclennan (1929-2009) was one of South Africa's best-loved teachers and the pre-eminent poet of his generation. Though he matured as a poet only in his fifties, he produced some twenty volumes before his death. None of our poets is more penetrating without cynicism, more beautifully thoughtful, or more readable. The Collected Poems gathers some 600 poems, including all the published volumes as well as numerous poems printed in periodical magazines and hitherto unavailable in one book. It shows clearly the poet's development towards a style of increasing spareness and lucidity of image. No poetry in the nation reveals greater passion for the mere fact of being alive or greater clarity of vision; few can match its uncompromising honesty and courage in the face of physical collapse and impending death.

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We all picture Shaka as a lean, mean, assegai-wielding warrior-king, the military genius who founded the Zulu nation. In fact, we don't actually know when he was born, what he looked like, or exactly when he died. Almost every other story you've heard is probably either wrong or contested. This biography draws on the last two decades of historical research to reassess the eyewitness accounts and use newly available oral traditions. The picture that emerges is astonishingly different from the popular stereotype.

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Examines what literature reveals about human attitudes towards elephants and who shows compassion towards them. Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every fifteen minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.Death and Compassion is the first study to probe various literary genres. It examines what these literatures imply about human attitudes towards elephants and who shows compassion towards them. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.

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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.

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