By Benevolence Mazhinji
As poet Jeannie Wallace McKeown stepped onto the stage at Amazwi last week, the room surged into a sea of anticipation for the launch of her latest poetry collection, Ornithology. She began with ‘Ground Zero’, her voice piercing the expectant silence:
My mother died this morning,
in the early hours,
and so tonight is the first night
of the world without her in it.
Night one.
Ground Zero.
“I started writing these poems the moment I arrived in St Francis after my mom passed away,” McKeown said. “I had a notebook on me, and I started writing.” Not surprisingly, the pain of this loss is almost palpable in her poems. The raw emotion seeping through every line feels like an open wound. Crystal Warren, a poet, librarian and museum curator at Amazwi, who introduced the poet, described this collection as “simple and accessible”. And it’s that very accessibility of McKeown’s language that makes her words cut so deep. It allows the reader to find themselves in her pain.
Later, McKeown said, “About three and a half years after my mom passed away, my dad became ill.” Barely above a whisper, she said, “My dad then passed away on the fifth of March 2020.” Her willingness to share her pain with unflinching honesty reminded me that great poems demand brutal vulnerability.
The poems are not all sad and existential. There is one, ‘Dream Runners’, which dates from a long lockdown during the Covid years and in which she describes her dogs dreaming about running. In the poem she describes the dogs’ movements:
paws flexing, muscles
twitching
barks issuing from deep
in their dream-tight throats
With such remarkable imagery and charm she captures the natural world and mundane tasks with .
I can agree with Crystal Warren who said, “This is a timeless poetry collection that is going to be around, to be read, to be loved and to be passed on to other people.”
Who is Jeannie Wallace McKeown?
Jeannie Wallace McKeown is a South African poet, writer, and editor. Her debut collection, Fall Awake (2020), was followed by notable wins, including the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2023 for ‘Climate Emergency’ and again in 2024 for ‘Global South’. She also took second place in the AVBOB Poetry Competition in 2023 with her poem ‘Water Crisis’. Ornithology, her second poetry collection, was launched on 12 September.
