Ingrid de Kok. Other Signs. Kwela / Snailpress, 2010. ISBN 978
0 7957 0397 3.
Reviewer: Joan Hambidge
The accomplished
English South African poet Ingrid de Kok’s new volume of poetry is a must read
packed with complex and seemingly simple poems. The poet regards her muse as a
male figure and argues deftly why this is the case. Her poems grapple with
losses, uncertainties and death; hence the muse should be a male figure (“My
muse is a man”, 51). Entitled Other Signs, her fifth volume, the reader is
positioned as a decoder in semiotic terms. The poems deal with political
issues, remembrance of things past, history, ecology and reflect on the
importance of poetry in a complex world. This is poetry in the space of the
private (longing for a child, reflections on the importance of friendship) and
the political domain. (De Kok’s poem on Bishop Tutu in a former volume will
always haunt me as an riveting poem on violence and our responsibility to forgive).
In the
acknowledgments we read (and decode) that some of these poems appeared in
earlier versions. De Kok’s poems are well balanced and deftly constructed. There is an interplay between poems in this
volume of an “inward gaze” ("At the Rembrandt House, Amsterdam”, 56) where the
poet focusses on the arbitrary sign or unexpected twist, namely the dog
sleeping for over four hundred years. “Married late” (38) with the repetition
of “I married early, then I married late” stresses the importance of form. The
incessant obsession with words is magnificently demonstrated in “Wings” (31):
Wings, you see,
it comes back to wings,
not lace, not
gossamer thread
intricately spun
to contain a world,
but burnished
angels, their unfurled wings
words that hide
or shelter, or lean forward into song.
Emily
Dickinson’s famous poem on the gossamer thread is neatly encoded in this ars
poetica and “On the hour” (24) the “unidentified sweet foreign blossom //
insinuates into the uncertain morning” stresses that the poem happens whilst we
dream or think about something else, a notion that reflects on Auden’s views of
poetry. “All things considered” (15)
analyses human indifference. Maybe we should know as the rabbi “to know what is
enough” (The rabbi speaks to the wind”, 14):
Give us this day
give us this
life
give us the key
“The owl and the
swan” (55) appeared on Litnet and is dedicated to Antjie Krog and John Samuel.
The poet addresses Krog’s desire to be an African and to listen to the messages
of birds, whilst swans represent an European consciousness.
I am an African,
I believe in the messages of birds
The volume is
hailed by the former poet laureate of America, Robert Pinsky, as a “vision of
her country through the lens of poetry”. An outstanding accomplishment published
by Kwela and Snailpress. And the male muse? There is a primacy of sound and
language that sings to the reader.
[This review has
been published in Cape Argus before.]