BOOK SA – News

Alert! Poet Ingrid Andersen (who, a little bird told BOOK SA, has a collection coming out soon), has just launched Incwadi a new online journal of poetry and photography. Two issues a year are planned, spring and autumn, and the spring issue has sprung, as many BOOK SA contributors have noted in the past week.

Incwadi’s current issue features poetry by Gary Cummiskey, Sumeera Dawood, Isobel Dixon, Gus Ferguson, John Forbis, Kerry Hammerton, Anton Krueger, Liam Kruger, Moira Lovell, Xoli Matomela, Michelle
McGrane, Helen Moffett, AR Reid Azila Talit Reisenberger, Arja Salafranca, Tania van Schalkwyk, Crystal Warren, Fiona Zerbst and Andersen herself. Photographs are by Gregor Rohrig, Anton Krueger, Liesl Jobson and Andersen again.

Submissions

Submissions of poetry or photographs for the Autumn issue are welcomed at incwadi.editor [at] gmail.com Photographs should be under 500kb in size.

• Visit Incwadi

Four poems from Incwadi

The Japanese have a word for it

That brief conflation
of joy and grief,

The rising sun,
the falling leaf.

– Gus Ferguson

*

A Part of Me is Gone

It’s not just twins, identical,
who feel this way
(thinking as one),
same-egged, conjoined
deep life-long linked
till hit and run –
or old age in my case:
not twinned, but fathered,
equally bereft.

Death, it seems, the fiercest
raider of identity,
for the survivor too – self’s theft.

Once genetic double,
mutual-celled;
equalled, answered, met –
but you were almost only goodness,
I the damaged bit that’s left.

– Isobel Dixon

*

Shrine

When you have traversed the desert,
your ochre footprints erased in sand drifts,
the valley monastery appears like a mirage,
its nine-bell tower and limewashed minaret
chanting paeans to Sinai’s spire.

After sluicing off dust,
the bristling stink of camel hair,
you eat lentil soup sprinkled with cumin,
ladled from a sooty pot.

Above the sixth century granite wall,
the rising wind carries frankincense
from basilica censers.

Torched sky the colour of blood
is extinguished. A fox greets the night
in his rocky lair.

– Michelle Mcgrane

*

Daughter steps

You two who
want from me all the whys
and every wherefore
could tell me why and wherefore

I have been shuffling
with folded paper feet
looking downward slitty eyed
expecting trip wires
and finding them

You two can stride out all seeing
in seven league boots
if you want

But I notice
that you are folding your feet
in imitation of my origami

– AR Reid

• More link love