Celebrated South African poet and teacher Don Maclennan was honoured at the posthumous launch of his Collected Poems at Rhodes University last week.
Celebrated South African poet and teacher Don Maclennan was honoured at the posthumous launch of his Collected Poems at Rhodes University last week.
At an intimate gathering of family, friends, and academic peers, Prof Dan Wylie introduced the collection, which he edited.
"This feels to me like the most important launch of my life," Wylie admitted as he opened the launch at Rhodes University’s Alumni House last Thursday 19 September. "I’m very, very glad that you’re here to share this."
Maclennan, who died in 2009, was a well-known poet, critic, playwright and English professor. His work carries a unique, distinct tone resounding with the deep experience and understanding that a long, examined life can bring.
Always reaching out to the ineffable, Maclennan often grazed it with his fingertips, managing to put into words those unspeakable elements of what it is to be human.
Maclennan’s work was always inextricably bound up with the reality it tried to describe. Its themes were as diverse as life itself: painting and music, philosophy and cosmology, geology and the prehistoric, poets and poetry, love, loss, and family.
Wylie took time to thank all those involved in putting together the impressive anthology (Maclennan published nearly 600 poems), which is a companion to No Other World, a 2012 collection of essays on Maclennan’s life work.
Before reading a handful of poems which had the audience in rapt silence, Wylie looked back on his first year at Rhodes University – and the first time he ever saw Maclennan on the library steps.
"He was tall and stringy, with boots and a battered red knapsack and a shapeless felt hat and his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest," he explained. "My first thought was, 'What is this tramp doing on campus?’".
But Maclennan was Wylie’s lecturer and tutor, and soon became his poetry mentor, rock-climbing instructor and "surrogate father".
Prof Emeritus Malvern van Wyk Smith, whose strong family friendship with the Maclennans started on the day they both arrived in Grahamstown to take up teaching posts in the English department in 1966, also spoke a few tender words at the launch.
"I found, making my way through these collected poems, that again and again Don was captured by the ceaseless quest for the image, the line, the word that would split open like a crystal to reveal the amazingness of existence," he said.
