POETIC LICENCE

This weekend I had the pleasure of sharing a poetry reading with two superb poets in one of South Africa’s truly special places: the Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda nestling in the shadow of the spectacular Compassberg peak. Grahamstown’s Dan Wylie and visiting Canadian poet Emily McGiffin helped make our appearance at Dustcovers Bookshop in the village a true delight.

We hadn’t prepared a theme for the reading but our shared interest in the environment, combined with a magnificently unspoiled setting, contrived somehow to connect the poems. Although they were all very different in style, voice and content, something natural seemed to breathe through the evening – and it worked.

Dan read a selection of poetry from his own collections but began the evening fittingly by paying homage to his friend, teacher and mentor, the late Don Maclennan, with whom Dan spent many hours climbing mountains, including Don’s favourite – Compassberg. In beautifully and typically condensed language, Maclennan pares away the trivial, overblown and gratuitous aspects of human existence (exemplified by “hate and politics”) to reveal its essential core: acknowledgement and restitution of “the world / in all its wonder”. Dan only read the first part of this lovely poem, but here it is in full:

Under Compassberg

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