Blunt truths, raw humour

Review of Quentin Hogge, More Poems, Boet (2016). 79pp.

For many years the self-styled “Ecca Poets” group has produced a substantial body of work, in almost annual communal collections, double bills and individual volumes. Operating out of the Hogsback, they have been unfairly neglected. They’ve waxed and waned a bit: the core have been Cathal Lagan, Brian Walter, and Norman Morrissey, at one time Mariss Stevens, more recently Silke Heiss. And Quentin Hogge. In his recent volume, More Poems, Boet, recently launched at NELM, Hogge relates – with a certain grumpy relish – how he was “censored” out of the group on account of a particularly un-PC poem. Since then, Hogge has cast himself adrift as a bluff and unapologetic raconteur of a certain hearty and honest Eastern Cape humour, boet.

He includes a characteristically blunt self-portrait:

Thick rugger bugger With a big vocabulary...

In an appended note, he finds this selfrevelation a “James Joycean epiphany. A Saul on the road to Damascus moment.” Really? It’s that deep? But then one is not always sure when he’s wryly sending himself up.

He is also often explaining himself, in notes much longer than the poems themselves. I said Hogge “cast himself”: there is always an expansively performative element to the presentation: “Now for some post-apartheid poems”, “And to end”, and such redundancies, as if he is delivering on stage.

Some readers will doubtless relish the detailed historical and contextual notes Hogge – ever the irrepressible teacher – provides for some of the more occasional poems – those on, for example, Nongqawuse the Xhosa “priestess” who sparked the 1856 cattle-killing, or a visit to the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town.

Among these ruminative extras are sometimes details of family history, such as that appended to a poem for his father, 'No Tears for the Austere'. He says he hesitated to print so personal a poem – but it’s precisely the personal that reaches into us – and it’s a moving poem:

I have shed no tears since the stroke clouded your eye and thickened your tongue. It has been years since we told the doctor no radical treatment, no smart medical tricks. [...] Last night the moon was very full, ripe, glorious, etched in detail and you told me how strong you are, and how embarrassed you would be if I now shed those tears.

Many of us will identify with the emotion-repressing maleness of that generation, and how it haunts us. It haunts even the humour of the raunchy poem ‘Male Menopause’, more distantly perhaps ‘Body anguish of boys’, concerning changes in Xhosa initiation rites.

As in the predecessor volume, Poems, Boet, most of the poems are set in Eastern Cape locales: the Kowie River valley, Grahamstown, Nieu Bethesda, the Pig & Whistle pub in Bathurst (a favourite reading/drinking spot, a photo of which adorns the cover). But – as the self-mocking sub-title of the volume asserts – there are also poems “from all over the place”: poems of travel to the Camargue, to Ios in Greece, to Fishbourne.

But it returns again compulsively to the Eastern Cape, its hills and its Bushman paintings, its disappearing rhinos and elephants, its elusive myths, its Aids graves and its “star-filtered dreams”. There are lovely tributes to his wife Penelope, and tributes to the region’s beguiling landscapes, such as 'Renosterberg Stones', dedicated to his daughter:

Little Jessica started a cairn of little stones between two bushes loud with cicada song near a stream on the Renosterberg. I helped, offered stones. And having co-constructed this universal symbol of belonging, this isivivane, the father-poet ends: And I thanked God for you, my daughter, your journey just begun, your conquest of me completed in this stone ritual, from Katmandu to the Karoo. You are more sacred then and now to me.

Paying tribute to his young offspring is the obverse of thinking of his own eventual demise; they remind him of his own waning youthfulness: “A primordial power awakes/ And age hovers”. He closes the volume with the appropriately brief ‘My funeral’:

I will speak at my funeral And after all the fine speeches I will tell the truth...

As if he hasn’t all along – Vincent Hogge likes to tease himself with accusations of his own fraudulence, but there are many poems here which stand strongly, accessibly and movingly on their own authentic foundations. • Dan Wylie is a researcher in literature and history, a poet, and lecturer in the Department of English at Rhodes University.