Modjaji Books, Love Books and the South African Psychoanalysis Initiative (SAPI) are delighted to invite you to the launch of Eliza Kentridge‘s debut collection of poems, Signs for an Exhibition. A poetry reading will be followed by a conversation between Eliza and psychoanalyst Mark Solms about the light her poems shed on the workings of her mind (or any mind).
Eliza Kentridge’s poems are autobiographical, the daughter of two lawyers who fought apartheid. In her twenties she left South Africa for England, where she became an artist. Against the dramatic background of her home country’s history, her focus is quieted, small and interior. With her mother afflicted by a serious neurological illness, she writes about family, love and place, as a woman who vividly recalls her girlhood self, gently and almost incidentally approaching one of the biggest questions: how does one live a life?
“Eliza Kentridge’s luminous Signs for an Exhibition is not so much a collection of discrete poems as a single continuous work that acquires increasing rhythmic and semantic power with each passing page. The poet’s agile movement from demotic utterance to perceptual fragment to tantalizing narrative moment do nothing less than create the startling illusion of having entered the fluctuations of another person’s intimate memories. This is a remarkable first book.” Siri Hustvedt
“Kentridge’s poems offer a direct line to her childhood and teenage years when she was ‘stapling the pages of myself together’. They are studded by sparks of metaphors and by a lightness of tone, a lack of melodrama.” Megan Hall
“These poems are beautiful… like reading a piece of blue sky” Dominique Botha
Eliza Kentridge
Eliza Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1962. She studied English Literature at Wits University before moving to England in the late eighties. She has worked for three decades as an artist, exhibiting in South Africa, England and the USA. She uses paper, fabric and clay to make work that revolves around glimpsed narratives and words – a sort of poetry. Now she outs herself as a writer, reverting to her original childhood plan. She lives with her family in a small waterside town in Essex.
For a Mail & Guardian review of the collection read here
Event Details
- Date: Monday, 21 September 2015
- Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
- Venue: Love Books, The Bamboo Lifestyle Centre, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville, Johannesburg
- Guest Speaker: Mark Solms
- Refreshments: Come and join us for a glass of wine and canapés
- RSVP: Love Books, 011 726 7408, 011 726 7408
www.modajibooks.co.za
Book Details
- Signs for an Exhibition by Eliza Kentridge
EAN: 9781920590796
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