A Place to Night in

Description

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’’