Gqeberha has featured in some impressive books recently: Ayanda Billie’s KwaNobuhle Overcast (Deep South, 2019) and Mxolisi Nyezwa’s Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits (Deep South, 2023), for example. Brian Walter’s welcome addition reworks into one volume his first two books, Tracks and Baakens, originally published by the Lovedale Press in 1999 and 2000. The re-publication has enabled the poet both to acknowledge the history of the past quarter-century and to find a new and just unity of structure, setting, and theme in the disparate earlier collections. A short foreword provides a useful introduction to the work.

The unity is signalled in the opening poem, which precedes even its own mention on the contents page. ‘Water Muse’ (For Cheryl) is a dedication of engaging candour which, like many of Brian Walter’s poems, dramatises poesis as being both animated and distracted by love: “some hangover of / conscience binds” the poet, yet his “pen / creeps reluctantly on”.

A recurring theme of the collection is metamorphosis and the muse takes on many personas: she is the ‘Daughter of Memory’ and ‘Persephone’ (parts ii and vi of ‘Swartkops’), and the night itself, as in part ii of ‘Sihamba-nge-nyanga’ (‘She Walks by Moonlight’) and ‘The Spinner’. She is the poet’s mother. The muse is his companion or she appears in chance encounters in the intensely evoked landscapes of the poems. She may be a “mirage” but he hears her “alluring voice” and she is “familiar with the shades”, and has a “mythic eye”. The climax comes in the penultimate poem in the ‘Baakens’ section, ‘City Muse’, which richly evokes both Gqeberha/ Port Elizabeth itself, and its pre- and post-apartheid history, as the poet allusively proclaims his allegiance:

…she held

that she was made of truth.

And still

I loved her, though I knew she lied.

The poem’s ending gathers up many of the threads of the sequence, acknowledging that poetry is a work of memory and imagination:

From the brink of the damned, the grey city looks down,

its dread nymph rising as her sly,

dark innocence of hair

beckons me back through a metamorphosis

in the floods that mingle the past and now,

to know her in stark dreams.

‘Albuca Longifolia’, the closing poem of the book, admits that “you have gone, and I don’t know where”.

There are male presences of inspiration too. The poet’s father’s craft and kindness are both a challenge and a humane model to “one who winds words, / and works at tapping away layers of sense” (‘Workman’) and the father is the poet’s guide in childhood through the mysteries of the Baakens Valley. One sadness of the sequence is that much of the Port Elizabeth his father knew is gone with him: “The father’s hands are folded and docked. / South End and Jetty Street now washed away” (‘Port Elizabeth, i. South End Childhood’).

Yet there are other sages, like “an oke come questing from the heart / of the old Eastern Cape” (‘The Cuckoo and the Eastern Cape Quest’ who is looking for “omething beyond”. And there is the sense throughout the sequence that poetry, for all its loneli- ness as a calling, is sustained by the companionship of other poets.

Brian Walter’s evocation of Gqeberha/Port Elizabeth, from Fort Frederick to Swartkops and beyond, takes us on childhood fishing and nature study expeditions to mature outings of recreation and re-exploration. The fauna and flora, the lie of the land, aspect and prospect—all are precisely and yet companionably evoked, from the “catabasis” along the shrunken stream of the Baakens, to “the hill”, from which the poet seems to see his city as Moses saw the Promised Land.

Walter makes poetry of the very place names themselves, not ignoring the sometimes grim and violent history, and his scope and vision reach beyond the city, into Africa, into mountains and Karoo, into Port Alfred, Alice, Nieu Bethesda, Buffelskop and the Transkei. For Gqeberha is the urban centre of the “old Eastern Cape”, which, as Brian Walter’s use of isiXhosa and Afrikaans reminds us, is the birthplace, in the nineteenth century, of South African identity in its multilingual manifestations. The point is movingly made by two quotations from Olive Schreiner at the STANZAS NO. 34 JUNE/JULY 2025 centre of the sequence. All help to give urgency and confidence to the poet’s injunction: “Be real here, grounded.”

For their revival, these poems have been “edited”, but the conviction remains that Brian Walter’s poetic voice was firm and distinctive from its first soundings. The verse is measured but free, clearly lineated, the rhythms responding precisely to the demands of narrative, description, speculation. The poet’s fashioning of metaphor is striking. In ‘Crustacean’ (crabs in this case), part viii of ‘Swartkops’, he closes on a characteristically just rhyme:

Memory crawls sideways, eyes on stalks,

never suspecting conscience:         the trap

into which float-dancing it walks.

‘Fairview Odyssey’ sums up the grim history of apartheid in images that combine the cultural, the political and the ecological:

Threads are lost; that side lies stripped.

They picked all orient and coloured out,

split blood knots, bleached the best land, and left

undone that rough and ready tapestry of home.

In ‘Direction’, the poet admits “I drift sluggishly into the stream / of the river’s rough mythology.” But the response to the environment is precise and intense:

The white bones of the cliffs tumble down

from the houses to our feet fynbos noses

our morning air reedbeds come into rustle

with the ecstasy of breeze.

(‘The Guineafowl Trail, iii. Passed Away’)

Brian Walter’s first volumes found a new life in Bernd Franke’s 2014 setting of ‘Floods’ for mixed choir. Down the Baakens Underground magisterially justifies the poet’s return to those early books.