This Questioning Terrain is the 17th poetry anthology by the Ecca poets – an Eastern Cape collective who support each other’s writing.
This Questioning Terrain is the 17th poetry anthology by the Ecca poets – an Eastern Cape collective who support each other’s writing.
Themes of looking at the world we live in and the people we share it with run throughout the book.
Brian Walter’s poems reflect on our position towards nature but also on being human.
His scope is broad, from an African violet in his garden to “Ngugi’s quests” and “wise women survivors”; from classical heroines finding a journey to life in Shakespeare to the death camp in Auschwitz; to a local political rally blaring loudhailers and promises.
There is a movement between the past and a “Now thirty years on” – a careful reflection on what it means to be alive with others in a world – being seen by a blind woman, mourning a dead friend, finding new ways of belonging.
On the surface the poem ‘Breakdown’ might be about killing a nest of “seven looking-up-at-me baby rats” in the home, but its compelling pace forwards presents a conundrum between thought and act.
The title of the anthology takes its name from Walter's poem ‘Primal’ – the speaker observes a group of baboons while with friends.
He draws a likeness between the baboons’ instinctual way of being in their environment and people’s instinctual way of searching for meaning, an exploration central to being and surviving.
… my mind
snatches at each grub our words turn up
as we cross this questioning terrain (from ‘Primal’)
Two of Norman Morrissey’s poems are formally addressed as nods of respect, a farewell to those who have gone – Colin Gardner and Seamus Heaney.
Other poems have a lighter touch, smiling gently on children absorbed in their cell phones along the road and the cares of close friends and family, reflecting on the seasons and aging.
Formally, most of these poems are presented as triplets.
There is the small noticing of details – comfort in the body, the importance of making a gift, marvelling in another’s friendship.
In a new context he returns web as a verb: “you talk of your day/- the friends you webbed”.
This also reflects the interest in wording, in searching for expression for the web of the world around us, the wish to catch the right words, even if they slip away.
Catch
I sit,
rod-tip
undipping
— no glint
of
words.
Silke Heiss seems to find a sense of home in Hogsback.
Though interwoven with relationships – care for the beloved in illness, pride in a son, joyful inclusion of strangers, guidance to children – there is a particular focus on Hogsback landscape and places.
Except for the formal Butterfly poem titled ‘Pedestrian’ using a mirroring rhyme scheme, most of her poems are either couplets or triplets with a flexible line expanding into long lines with alliterative bite and short lines tidying into an emotional focus.
Though one wonders how a series of poems starts with one declaring the poet no longer interested in writing – there is something serious and gentle in the sense of reconsidering selfhood within a new way of being with another.
The pen no longer comforts me,
I seem to be over, somehow.
The whole concept of ‘I’
has come to be redundant (from ‘Somehow I don’t care’)
Eight of Lara Kirsten’s poems in the anthology are in Afrikaans.
Hers is a poetry of larger statements, greater wordiness, a sense of exuberance.
Celebrating life in its senses of seclusion, togetherness and turmoil, connecting with natural processes, being in love, accepting and making claims on people from the past and present.
Her interest in words is also clear in her playful English poem full of portmanteau words ‘our worryphernalia knows only dutbinfinity’.
There’s a lovely humour poking tongue-in-the-cheek at over-seriousness in this poem:
“ah, come on, what has happened to your blisschivousness?
our tongues need to return to their original tasticality”
Alvené Du Plessis’ poetry is of a quieter kind.
There is a slightly nostalgic look towards childhood, growing up in the countryside, learning to read.
There is also a sense of belonging and responsibility towards the land where she finds herself – difficult memories of someone murdered, unacknowledged love, being far away from home and a surprising poem in the form of a letter to her nanny.
Surprising in the chaos it allows, how what could sound like a list of complaints is transformed into an exchange of gratitude for love for a child.
Du Plessis too has a poem on writing, but with a reversal on Heiss' – the impression is that it is not so much poems scrunched up in a drawer, but life that ends up discarded and forgotten.
in die onderste laai van my lessenaar
met halfgeëte brood
en koekies
wat ek vergeet het
om vir die hond te gooi. (from: ‘Oorskiet’)
Cathal Lagan also honours Heaney with an image of the great Irish poet’s heritage – his connection with rural villages, the humility of leaving as physical memento, his jacket over a chair (‘The chair’).
His poems in the anthology speak of a childhood in Ireland and finding himself elsewhere.
A life change is described in the poem ‘Baptism’, which is concerned with the “the edge of mystery” recognisable in anyone’s life.
His is a light touch with gentleness and humour.
Lagan’s lines hold moments, thoughts, consolations and disturbances in harmony.
He uses the rituals of Christianity to explore this complex relationship with words in ‘Found in translation’ and in ‘Cemetery’, wondering if words in a foreign language “tough/and magical” might ironically do what rationality cannot – “bring [the heart]near to mystery/passing/all understanding”.
He is perhaps the most aware of the limitations of words.
‘Persona’ (with the poet as dog) presents a darker note on the role of the poet – “Let him be the poet proper…” as social critic, harbinger of the new, the beautiful commitments.
ringing in the new,
stretching …
stretching the leash.
Indeed a questioning terrain – this searching for where and who we are. The ECCA poets choose writing as one way of looking, of holding what is past, and what is becoming within a present homecoming.
Review by Marike Beyers, NELM, of This Questioning Terrain by the ECCA poets. Hogsback: Ecca, 2014, ISBN: 978-0-620-60529-8
