Obeisiance to Frogs
The poems in this collection offer up a precise honouring of the wild, with a deeply felt sense of attachment to a planet in peril.
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Obeisiance to Frogs
An Obeisance to Frogs, is Robin Winckel-Mellish’s third poetry collection. In these pieces the contrast between the natural worlds of South Africa and Europe are brought into sharp focus, and her eye for detail and emotional connectedness to place and people are especially highlighted. The poems cross thresholds between animals, love and finally The Kaggen cycle, which is rich in mythology both personal and cultural. These poems offer up a precise honouring of the wild, with a deeply felt sense of attachment to a planet in peril.
South African-born Robin Winckel-Mellish has lived in the Netherlands for many years. She set up a poetry critique group in Amsterdam and her poems have appeared in various South African and International journals and anthologies. She spends as much time as possible in South Africa.
These poems are a mantra, a song to living things. This beautiful collection is a keen, intuitive observation of the natural and the inner world, of wisdom and insight gained.
Christine Coates, poet
There is a quietness and understatement in Robin Winckel-Mellish’s poetry that is deceptive. It makes me think of a coiled spring, tense with the energy it conceals. ‘So I can lose myself / so I can find myself’ – the closing couplet of one of her poems is a clue to these poems where self-discovery and the confrontation with the natural world converge. The landscape is never neutral but is deployed to question her, or else it is shown as under threat. The energy lies hidden in the form. Stillness contains motion. The long poem with which the book ends, ‘Kaggen, the Thief of Time’ relates the reconquest of time through memory and has an ambition that shows what this poet is capable of.
Donald Gardner, poet, and translator
