Book Launch: Now The World Takes These Breaths by Joan Metelerkamp

The Book Lounge and Modjaji Books are delighted to invite you to the launch of Joan Metelerkamp’s eighth volume of poetry, Now the World Takes These Breaths. Joan will be in conversation with Colleen Crawford Cousins, and will read from her new collection.

“If there is a poet in South Africa today who writes the voice of the soul – made awful flesh, fragile, flagrant – then it must be Joan Metelerkamp.” Kobus Moolman

As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp’s work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the ‘sonnets’ ( ‘soundings’) of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book – at its simplest it traces the story of a mother’s “letting-go” her grown children, a daughter’s relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!

More about Joan Metelerkamp
Joan Metelerkamp is one of South Africa’s foremost poets. She is the author of seven previous books of poems. Her poetry is quite different to that of most of her local contemporaries and has been favourably compared to that of Anne Carson and Louise Glück. Her work won literary prizes (SANLAM, Sydney Clouts) in the early 1990s and later she judged the DALRO and Ingrid Jonker prizes. Her poems have been widely published in local and international anthologies of South African poetry, and she has taken part in readings and literary festivals here and in Europe and America. She edited the South African poetry journal New Coin for some years and has also written poetry reviews and essays. She lives on a farm near Knysna.

Event Details

• Date: Thursday, 23 October 2014
• Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
• Venue: The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town
• Guest Speaker: Colleen Crawford Cousins
• Refreshments: Come and join us for a glass of wine
• RSVP: The Book Lounge, booklounge@gmail.com, 021 462 2425
  www.modjajibooks.co.za

Book Details

• Now The World Takes These Breaths by Joan Metelerkamp
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9781920590536
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