South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Life

Poetry as antidote: A journey through grief, love and the transformative power of language

20 Jan 2025

At the end of 2024 South African poet Ingrid de Kok published Unleaving, a significant collection of substantial new poems. At a time of growing anxiety, uncertainty and violence a revival and reassertion of one of humankind’s oldest forms of expression and social commentary — poetry — is desperately needed. Speaking for myself, de Kok’s poems were just the antidote I needed to the crucifixion of truth and connection that occurs in so much of today’s language of expression.

In a country or a world with a different value system, the publication of a new trove of poetry by a writer such as Ingrid de Kok should have been celebrated with the same fanfare as Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter or — perhaps more in tune with de Kok’s themes — Nick Cave’s Wild God.

But in a world that is lazy to labour for meaning — even though it desperately seeks it — most poetry is still consigned to the margins of modern culture. This is despite evidence of a revival of the practice of poetry across the world.

That’s a pity.

Since de Kok’s first volume Familiar Ground was published by Ravan Press (remember them?) in 1988 her contribution to South African poetry has spanned almost 40 years.

This latest volume is a reminder of why, in the years in between, she has come to be regarded as one of South Africa’s greatest poets: the bookends of her life as a poet reflecting both the dramatically changed conditions in South Africa as well as the swells and eddies of the sensitive human spirit as it is buffeted through a range of universal and personal experiences and emotions.

Unleaving is a book of words (if you will allow the tautology) about words; their almost independent existence before they attach themselves to us or are netted by us to describe our human experience.

De Kok is a poet’s poet: quietly referential, ever conscious of how the beauty of words lies in their infinite variety and diversity; how words dress and mingle differently in different social, geographical, political and personal environments; how, throughout the history of language, words have proved eternally capable of metamorphosis, infinitely flexible in form, rhythm, sound and meaning.

Indeed, Scent, the lone poem in the book’s prologue, lays the table for the feast of thought that is to come, starting as follows:

When a hungry word

waits, watching for me,

it is not concealed,

behind a courtier’s back,

In this poem, de Kok reflects on the way in which the words that have devoured her are words distinct to the experience of a person living in “my arid South”, concluding by calling the words and thoughts that consume her “my very own vermin”. Scent contrasts de Kok’s jackal-words with Ted Hughes’ “green-eyed fox”.

Yet paradoxically Unleaving proves to be full of words that combine sensitivity and violence; are ordinary but enormous; mundane, but magnificent; lyrical meditations on loss, love and growing old.

The poet’s preoccupation with words is evident when the penultimate poem of the book returns to the subject of words:

At seventy

you can become

a person who

writes at midnight

because there is

no one to wake to disturb

nothing awake to disturb

but words.

At its heart Unleaving is an intensely personal collection.

The composition of the poems seem to span a decade, but they pivot on the year 2021, “this year of grief”, a year in which de Kok lost two of her greatest loves, her partner, Tony Morphet, and brother Kenneth de Kok.

But if you want to understand the weight of that year, pause to recall that 2021 was also a national and global year of loss due to Covid-19, which makes its meditations on death, “allowable grief” and loss all the more poignant.

Read more: Lest we forget — Covid-19 and the many different kinds of love it brought us

The poems in the second section of the book — The night not ready — contemplate impending death of a most-loved one, death itself, the moment of parting, as well as after-death, manifest in the thoughts and actions of those who live on.

It’s a hard subject, but its foundation is a deep love sustained over many years, and the contradictions that the thoughts, images and memories created in a life don’t end with death.

As de Kok writes in The year that wants to end or begin:

Though tired lungs

Batten down their hatches

As the dark hours topple

There is blue,

Improbably, there is air.

The book is divided into five sections, a prologue and an epilogue. Each section is divided by the image of a carefully selected and beautifully reproduced art work, adding texture — almost in conversation with the poems that follow.

It has 62 poems — and none of them are fillers. Its themes overlap, surface, disappear and resurface. But each poem has a unique identity; some carry dark or wry humor; some irony; some mix minute but familiar observations — what Nick Cave calls “the miracles nestled in the ordinary” — into a deep questioning, relying on familiarity to draw us into the poet’s ruminations.

Some simply observe.

I challenge you to find a better description of a highveld thunderstorm than Petrichor, Johannesburg. (OED: “Petrichor: a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.”)

However, as much as Unleaving is personal, a kind of private Last Post to love and comradeship, it is also infused with reflections on the trials, traumas and tribulations of what de Kok, in the poem What country, friends, is this?, calls:

… a country

half-forgiven

almost beloved.

Our South Africa.

Thus, section IV of the book, Mother Country: Names, delves into the tragedy of infanticide, drawing on newspaper stories that may be all too familiar to us (Found poem, found baby) and with the poem Mabiki putting our horror (or maybe our normalisation) of women and children’s pain, and the continuation and desperation of this practice, into a historical perspective:

in case I thought that what we do —

killing of the newly born —

is singular or new.

But it is the poem, Closed for reasons of joy, that seems to me to be the best paean on the state of South Africa’s trauma.

Spanning 30 years it encapsulates the crossing de Kok herself has made as a writer whose early poems delved into the agonies of apartheid, truth and reconciliation to the state we find ourselves in today.

The poem takes its title from a sign placed on a shopfront in Copenhagen to mark the ending of World War 2. It recalls South African’s own naive and blinkered joy at the end of apartheid “when reason and hope leapt in the streets”; our willing for a deep transformation that history should tell us would not come easily.

Reporters of these things

warn, repeat in each case

that despite the freed flags

and the hugging in the streets

a war zone after war ends

is not a sweet fresh spring.

The beauty of poetry (and this poem) is that on a subject on which journalists, opinion and book writers still spill thousands of words, the poet captures our essence in but a few; the images, the silences, the ellipses are enough to help us recall, resonate and find meaning.

There’s realism, disappointment but no denigration, grief, and finally even a flicker of hope:

Yet even today, years later

when erosion unearths the land,

olive branches wilt, chalices calcify,

we long to congregate

as we did that first day

to celebrate unshuttered life.

Still yearn to read that sign,

“Closed for reasons of joy”

say on a corrugated spaza store

where we imagine its tall owner,

migrant from the imploded north,

at last embraced by neighbours,

as we try to sing freedom once more

though wary now, only half-willing

to pay its volatile price.

DM

Unleaving is published by Fourthwall Books and is available from Love Books in Johannesburg and Clarke’s Bookshop and Kalk Bay Books in Cape Town as well as other bookstores.

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