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There Are Two Birds at My Window

by Allan Kolski Horwitz

There are two birds at my window / one of wood, one of stone / green stone of the rocks by the river / shone to shine with its depths / hard wood that grows in the mountain earth / scented with wind and dust and rain”: Kolski Horwitz opens this collection with a powerful physicality that embraces all of nature and locates the human being in a wide and elemental chain.

The 84 poems in this collection utilize many elements, touching equally on the “fire and flare of invention” as well as on “the springs of joy and convulsion”. Post-Apartheid, neo-Liberal South Africa subjects us to enormous pressures. This book bears poetic testimony to the maelstrom – the philosophic mixing with the symbolic, the lyric with agitation – being the fruits of a “situated and sensitive” consciousness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Kolski Horwitz was born in 1952 in Vryburg, South Africa but grew up in Cape Town. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East, Europe and North America, returning to live in Johannesburg in 1986. Since then, he has worked as an organiser and educator in the trade union and social housing movements. He is a writer in various genres as well as being a songwriter and singer. Since leaving full-time employment in the trade unions in 2009, he continues on an ad hoc with his work as an educator and activist. He is a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and of the Botsotso board of management.

 

ISBN 9780987017857
Pages
Dimensions
Published 2012
Publisher Dye Hard Press, South Africa
Format Paperback