Slowly, As If
Published on 1. November 2012
156 pages
978-1-84777-657-0 (ISBN)
Description
In Slowly, As If, Karen Press looks clear-eyed at what it means to live in a complex society, a fragile world. She celebrates the connectedness that sustains us - in dance, in love, with the natural world, in cities where 'strangers seem happy / to let you be' - and sees it betrayed by our unreflecting complicity in poverty and violence. The death of a child who 'barely scratched the air of the country' resonates in her tender, devastating account: 'When a child dies, who is responsible?'
Slowly, As If asks hard questions with grace and wit, balancing the particular and the universal. 'Being told / you're made of stardust / is not helpful / as you sit holding a parking ticket', but it is, none the less, a truth.
Slowly, As If asks hard questions with grace and wit, balancing the particular and the universal. 'Being told / you're made of stardust / is not helpful / as you sit holding a parking ticket', but it is, none the less, a truth.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
File size
0,64 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-84777-657-0 (9781847776570)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Karen Press
Slowly, as If
Book
06/2012
Carcanet Press Ltd
€18.50
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Person
Karen Press lives in Cape Town. She has published eight poetry collections as well as mathematics textbooks and children's books. Her poetry has appeared in journals in South Africa, Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, and in translation in French, Italian, Turkish and Tamil. She co-founded the publishing collective Buchu Books and currently works as a freelance editor and writer.
Content
'Photographing the building is forbidden until the war is over'
Your Saddam
Cyrus Vance sat on my couch
The Daisy Cutter
A cow and a goose
Specialised
Skypointing
And all the time
Monument to the South African Republic (on some photographs by David Goldblatt)
Ravenous
Eight frescoes from the lost palaces of Zanj
the furious women bare themselves
the four students run for the border
he hides all night while they murder his family
they were caught and chained in a van
she gave birth while prison guards tortured her and laughed
a six-year-old boy is digging a grave for a baby
the colours there
like paper flowers unfolding in water
Local fauna
Be bear
Non sequitur
In the empty station
Man series I
Six eggs in the fridge
Mindfulness
Thank you Lee Smolin, thank you Mr Leibniz
If you wrote about domestic things
Once we did get out of the car
Men always have an idea
Shine
The sad little poems
Pasternak's shadow
Love songs for Lake Como
Val di Bondo
Amsterdam night
Over there
Ten minutes on a Sunday morning in July
You never were much good at physics
Breakfast
Love and stories of love
If he'd been called Jesse
Letters to Tom
Really, there's nothing
A man with no power
Fast asleep
Odd calculus
On fire
Whipped cream
Do you love yourself like this
Hotel Rwanda, 1 January 2006
Praise poem: I saw you coming towards me
Mnemonics
A child can't be born
In Cameroon, August 2005
The pool attendant at the First International Inn in Limbe
The quality of postcards
Elaine's garden
Three meditations on immortality
Three meditations on Why is there war, Mummy?
The last threshold
The passivity of the spectator must be countered at all costs
This is the bit where you live
Literary biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet
Out on the ocean
Closer than this - extracts from a source book for urban planners
And on the eighth day
Connected
The things that survive are the things that survive
Statistics South Africa says
Unplace
City streets
To love it
Typology
The urban planner ruminates
Uses of useful plants
The one who dies
Tango for person and city
Deer on the freeway
Riffs for the caring girl
Great and true
Phendukani Silwani
Poem for which there was no title
Folk dancing for beginners
He sets the tone
So where were you
The laws of physics are inviolable
Take your places
Where to from here?
The coastline seems endless
It goes like this
You are here
Balancing
Acknowledgements and notes
Your Saddam
Cyrus Vance sat on my couch
The Daisy Cutter
A cow and a goose
Specialised
Skypointing
And all the time
Monument to the South African Republic (on some photographs by David Goldblatt)
Ravenous
Eight frescoes from the lost palaces of Zanj
the furious women bare themselves
the four students run for the border
he hides all night while they murder his family
they were caught and chained in a van
she gave birth while prison guards tortured her and laughed
a six-year-old boy is digging a grave for a baby
the colours there
like paper flowers unfolding in water
Local fauna
Be bear
Non sequitur
In the empty station
Man series I
Six eggs in the fridge
Mindfulness
Thank you Lee Smolin, thank you Mr Leibniz
If you wrote about domestic things
Once we did get out of the car
Men always have an idea
Shine
The sad little poems
Pasternak's shadow
Love songs for Lake Como
Val di Bondo
Amsterdam night
Over there
Ten minutes on a Sunday morning in July
You never were much good at physics
Breakfast
Love and stories of love
If he'd been called Jesse
Letters to Tom
Really, there's nothing
A man with no power
Fast asleep
Odd calculus
On fire
Whipped cream
Do you love yourself like this
Hotel Rwanda, 1 January 2006
Praise poem: I saw you coming towards me
Mnemonics
A child can't be born
In Cameroon, August 2005
The pool attendant at the First International Inn in Limbe
The quality of postcards
Elaine's garden
Three meditations on immortality
Three meditations on Why is there war, Mummy?
The last threshold
The passivity of the spectator must be countered at all costs
This is the bit where you live
Literary biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet
Out on the ocean
Closer than this - extracts from a source book for urban planners
And on the eighth day
Connected
The things that survive are the things that survive
Statistics South Africa says
Unplace
City streets
To love it
Typology
The urban planner ruminates
Uses of useful plants
The one who dies
Tango for person and city
Deer on the freeway
Riffs for the caring girl
Great and true
Phendukani Silwani
Poem for which there was no title
Folk dancing for beginners
He sets the tone
So where were you
The laws of physics are inviolable
Take your places
Where to from here?
The coastline seems endless
It goes like this
You are here
Balancing
Acknowledgements and notes
