BOOK SA – News

Alert! After a long hiatus, New Coin, the poetry journal of Rhodes University’s Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), is back, with the first volume of its issue 45 now available for purchase.

New Coin traditionally appears twice a year, in June and December, and, although number one of issue 45 was a bit late this year, its fraternal twin is being shaped from clay by new editor Crystal Warren as we speak, and should squeak into being before the new year.

The contributors to 45/1 are: Dudu Saki, Clive Lawrance, Damian Garside, Sarah Frost, Ingrid Andersen, Karin Schimke, Kyle Steven Allan, Natalie Railoun, Ross Fleming, Arja Salafranca, Haidee Kruger, Jane Caroline, Peter Midgley, Robert Szabo, John Carse, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Grace Kim, Danie van Jaarsveld, Deliz Nzekwu, Brian Walter, Lungelo Mbatha, Beverley Rycroft, Ken Barris, Rosemund Handler, Robert Edward Bolton, Mandy Mitchell, Elizabeth Trew, Denis Hirson, Anna Varney-Wong, Corinne Knowles, Liesl Jobson, Tendai Mwanaka, Vonani Bila, Dan Wylie, John Forbis, Harry Owen, Norman Morrissey, Jeanette Eve and Quentin Hogge.

There are also poetry reviews, plus a special tribute section in memoriam Don Maclennan, who died earlier this year.

To order an individual copy of New Coin, write to isea@ru.ac.za; and here’s more information on subscriptions and submissions:

New Coin subscriptions

Two issues a year, in June and December
2009 – R128
2008 – R117

Cheques should be made out to Rhodes University, and posted to New Coin, ISEA, PO Box 94, Grahamstown, 6140. For electronic payment please email the ISEA office at isea@ru.ac.za for account details and reference number.

Submissions

Up to six unpublished English poems. Electronic submissions preferred, to be emailed to isea@ru.ac.za.

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Four poems from New Coin 45 no. 1

What’s Left of You

(for Don Maclennan)

In the mornings of approaching
winters, I hear only the pulsing of crickets
and the small stirring of grasses
as the line of the horizon begins to appear.

You have left us to this solitude
as you became a cloud drifting
off your beloved mountain,
dolerite and agathosma,

words echoed in the voices
of your children carrying your
remains to the summit, but
silence now shrouds this landscape.

I want you to tell me
that story again,
you know the one,
the myth that lives you into being.

Did you finally become it?
Is that why your ashes have
dissipated in the wind? You’ve said
all you can? That you have finally become what you love?

– John Forbis

*

Home/sick

You can let love be a blanket, here,
not a bulletproof vest.
No dogs bark in the night.
Nobody weeps or screams, though
there is evidence of dreaming,
sieved over the soil in the morning light.
People do not sell cigarettes or souls on pavements.
Nobody gets struck by lightning. The world
wears earmuffs. Glass is enough.

But it is always there,
or here,
or neither here
nor there:
skulking like a sneeze that doesn’t come, a magnetic scar,
a memory of moulting,
an orphaned star.

Words haunt the space between road and loam:
You’re always
halfway home.

– Haidee Kruger

*

Give us today our daily ceasefire

In the day we pass a package
between us, heavy with exasperation,
spiky with misunderstanding, alive with fury.

But when we sleep we soften,
we reach across it

                    – across continents -

to palpate the flesh of “sorry”
and “I hate this.”

Never sure which to trust:

these dumbly reaching limbs,
or that ticking package.

– Karin Schimke

*

It is a risk

To open up the words,
unfold them onto paper.

found vowels,
hidden sibilants

chosen plosives
shift into shapes
on a page.

– Ingrid Andersen