Title: Recollections
Author: James Gardener
Size: 210mm x 148mm, 68 pages
ISBN: 978-1-920094-45-4 (print)
I first started to write poetry in my last year at school in Cape Town, 1975.
In retrospect, I can isolate three things that came together to spark me off. The first was the loss of my younger brother, Richard, who died after the last in a lifelong series of asthma attacks. Then I fell in love with the leading lady in my school drama production. And finally there was an uneasy sense of having to move on beyond the comfort zone of an unremittingly happy set of schooldays.
Ever since those years, some confluence of these three forces – loss, love and change – has found me taking refuge in verse and metre, word picture and jagged rhyme, to help me form and express my responses to their tugging. The resulting patterns are here in these pages.
This re-collection from amongst drifts of notebooks, exam papers, till slips, beer mats, theatre programmes, train timetables and air-sickness bags has given me much pleasure and pause for thought. Emotion recollected in tranquillity.
‘Enjoy!’ as Andre, the waiter in the Cat’s Pyjamas, Melville, Johannesburg, first taught me how to say with meaning.
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