About the collection

In this poetry collection, Frank Meintjies navigates, to quote one of the poems, “the land, the land, the land” and engages with issues of dislocation, diverse landscapes, nature, attachments to place, and community.

As Prof David Medalie of Pretoria University observes, “The experiences described in A place to night in, although intensely personal, are suffused with a wider history of displacement, uprootedness and the search for a home. Frank Meintjies has taken the shards of a fractured past and transformed them into beautifully wrought and linguistically deft poems.’’

To be followed by Lisa Combrinck who for many years headed the literature section at the Department of Arts and Culture: “Meintjies’s poetry – without fanfare and bells and whistles –quietly defies the South African temptation to tell lies about themselves, about ourselves. Instead, his mission is that of the excavator, an awkward truth-teller, a pathfinder, the poet at work whose grappling with words reveals real truths and the will to move forward based on that which has been brought to light.’’

And lastly, In Hein Willemse’s words, “In Meintjies’s collection, the key themes of place and displacement in their multiplicity of concrete and metaphorical meanings are present: the uneasy new spaces that “consider me / observe me”, the sense of “unbelonging” and the self, enfolded “in abiding and unabiding truths’’.

Reviews

• Litnet May 2025
• Stanzas June 2025

About the author

Originating in Pietermaritzburg, Frank Meintjies has lived in the Western Cape and Gauteng. He has worked in the field of social development over many decades. Frank’s creative writing has been included in several journals or anthologies, including the Botsotso Literary Journal, Ons Klyntji and Absolute Africa. 

His poetry collections include Lockdown Poems, Unfettered Days, Connexions and My Rainbow. His work was repeatedly selected for inclusion in the Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology and his poems feature in the Grade 11 textbook, Vistas of Poems and the Grade 12 textbook, Landscapes of Poems. Frank is also featured in the book Twelve + One Joburg.