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    Groundwork
    Groundwork
    Groundwork
    Ebook85 pages31 minutes

    Groundwork

    By Rustum Kozain

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    About this ebook

    In this new collection Rustum Kozain, who won both the Ingrid Jonker Prize (2006) and the Olive Schreiner Prize (2007) for This Carting Life, raises his own bar. Groundwork retains strong connections with Kozain's early work, but it does so while simultaneously introducing a group of poems that indicate the promise of work to come. His voice has strengthened and has a new confidence, making the poems (paradoxically) lighter - though they are not without his trademark seriousness. This is a thoughtful, pitch-perfect collection that resonates with the reader long after the last poem is read.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKwela
    Release dateJul 16, 2012
    ISBN9780795704314
    Groundwork

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      Book preview

      Groundwork - Rustum Kozain

      Groundwork_final.jpg

      Rustum Kozain

      Groundwork

      Kwela Books/Snailpress

      for Hetta

      Crouching

      deep in our jagged-dagger dreaming,

      we find a thick-cloaked skeleton

      of the sunrises that were never to be,

      whose impatient roar

      we must now explain.

      – Khulile Nxumalo, ‘The Great Discount’

      Regret

      I am regret, that slow vulture

      that comes too late,

      that skirts the congregation,

      the carcass well past use,

      a wrong choice long forgotten

      that passes now

      as abstract of history,

      malleable to anyone’s interest, or mine,

      picked at, turned over and over,

      until its shrivelled tendons –

      dry as bone –

      turn white, then fine as ash

      soon taken by the wind.

      That regret, the slow vulture

      that came too late,

      that must itself die

      but lives as shadow,

      a shade that flaps

      inside the head’s chambers

      where I leave the unsaid unsaid,

      conjuring instead

      the absent word

      into that old, old flinch.

      I am that regret.

      I

      This is the sea

      After a photograph by Victor Dlamini

      There is that sea, deep sometimes

      as the heart at dusk,

      the shine on its face soon to fade.

      There is that caravel drifting in

      and all it brings: a load of good

      and the bad unreckoned by the quartermaster.

      The homing birds that come or go.

      The sun that’s set,

      now only a shade smudged by fog.

      From empty rooms, frosting windows,

      no one saw

      its dying spectacle.

      There is something of this sea –

      its cold and darkening deep –

      in the human heart, in me,

      that lies unfathomed,

      beyond all sounding,

      that does not know its own dark treachery.

      Storytelling

      Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted,

      except precisely by saying that one retracts it.

      – Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’

      In indecision we drive a block,

      then stop at the end of my cul-de-sac

      to look at passing cars, graffito tags

      on vibracrete, and curious neighbours.

      The sun draws water, a seagull

      flies its sorties looking to scavenge,

      a skittish lemoenduif

      launches in fright from a garden wall.

      We try again with logic to loosen

      a knot, our complication: you

      will stay with your lover;

      I will return to waiting

      for that empty click of the snug fit

      and the faculty of abstract nouns –

      love, death, God. And time

      that will not freeze. I speak as if

      I can speak, presume, and speak for you.

      You flash with anger. Like a child

      I wish I could reel back time,

      turn it all back by the one click

      needed to return words to inchoate

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