Popcorn gunfire, township quilts and a twitching dance of love. These are some of the multi-faceted images in Aerial 2009 that explode in the reader’s imagination, taking them into magical worlds.
Popcorn gunfire, township quilts and a twitching dance of love. These are some of the multi-faceted images in Aerial 2009 that explode in the reader’s imagination, taking them into magical worlds.
This anthology is the fruit of six months of creative writing classes presented by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) and facilitated by fellow poets Robert Berold, Crystal Warren, Mindy Stanford and Dudu Saki.
Talent is varied but the thought-evoking poetry and prose in this community collaboration succeeds in drawing the reader in from the start.
First-time editors Megan van der Nest and Amy Goodenough highlight childhood, adult relationships and the darkness of human life as the three distinctive themes.
The collection kicks off with Goodenough’s The smell of morning, which rekindles childhood adventures. The reader is drawn into a single child’s imaginary world of a sacred naartjie temple and the secret isle of avocado.
In Ann Ashburner’s Addressed to mother one twin challenges her mother for not seeing the two sisters as individuals.
“Did you even know where Jane’s dress ended and mine began?” she asks. Interwoven with free-verse poetry are prose pieces, many of which feature adult relationships.
An evocative but playful piece called Trés Belle by Shashi Cook recounts a car trip through Mali. The speaker is caught between her admiration of a beautiful Malian woman and her envy of the attention a male passenger in the car gives the passerby.
Nora Lee Wales’ The City vibrantly reconstructs a lunch date in which the reader is left uncertain
about whether the rendezvous actually happened.
Engaging prose in the anthology is regrettably counter-balanced with first person-centred pieces that read like diary entries.
The shortage of dialogue and clichéd descriptions make for tedious reading at times. This is, however, the first time that many of the writers have been published, and they can all can be commended for undertaking the painstaking process of reworking their art to the point of publication. Darker themes are threaded through the collection.
The speaker in Dudu Saki’s Embittered Soul is “that unlucky creature the world evicts before conception”. In the rhythmically flowing Bewell bewell, Rosamund Stanford creates her own vocabulary to comment on our “rewoundandfastforwarded” lives.
The collection concludes with Deva Lee’s Meditations on dystopia, in which the speaker’s world will not end in spectacular fireworks but with dead deserts and sweeping winds.
Each writer brings something personal to the anthology: a window into an intimate or quirky moment in time which does not fail to trigger memories in the reader’s own life.
