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Your friendly guide to English poetry

Your friendly guide to literary terms - book cover

by J.O. Hendry
First published 1998
199 pages
ISBN 0-620-22882-2
100 000 copies sold
A5 book in soft cover
Price (incl VAT) R 97-66

An anthology of poetry, classical and modern, by all the well-known British and American writers, with a large selection of 20th-century South African poetry by writers of all cultures.

All the poems are supported by notes and questions to stimulate critical discussion, to encourage the formation of personal opinions, and to develop the skills of poetry appreciation; with biographical notes on the poets, and a glossary of literary terms and writers' techniques uniquely cross-indexed to examples in the poems.

As well as being an excellent collection of poems for the general reader, Rhythm and muse is suitable for classroom use by students, for lesson preparation by teachers, and for independent study by distance/correspondence learners, at both secondary and tertiary level.

This is an immensely popular book, of which we have sold more than 100 000 copies (March 2004).

Here is an example of the approach used in the book:

DOUGLAS LIVINGSTONE 1932-1996

Douglas Livingstone, born in Malaysia, spent most of his life in South Africa, where he worked in Durban as a marine bacteriologist. Typically his poetry reflects his scientific mind and his biological interest in the creative and destructive forces of the natural world (Gentling a wildcat); but he explores other issues as well (Vanderdecken reveals a life-long love of the sea), and possesses a strong social conscience.

His writing has a powerful graphic quality, created by striking, provocative imagery, and by the unusual, original perspectives from which he views his subject matter.

Livingstone's poems have been widely published in Africa, Britain and the USA. In 1965 he received the Guinness Poetry Award, and in 1970 the Cholmondely Prize for poetry; his Selected Poems won the 1985 CNA Award. He is recognised as one of South Africa's foremost modern English-language poets.

Christopher Hope described him as the one most widely admired by poets of all political persuasions; Michael Chapman recognised that he really anticipated this country's post-apartheid concerns and considered him to be our first Twenty-first-century poet.


VANDERDECKEN
Sometimes alone at night
lying upon your surf-ski
far beyond the sharknet

5: drifting on the salt-wet belly
of your mistress the black ocean,
cool under a windless moonless sky

your dangling toes you hope
not luminous from below,
dozing to the sleepy remote

10: mutter of shorelusting breakers
you start hearing the thrash
of bone, foam and wake;

15: splintering yardage and thrumming
cords; creak, groan and rattle
of blocks – and, trembling

as you lie, wet from your own death-
salt, you hear the solitary
hopeless steady cursing in Dutch.

1. The allusion on which the poem is based is to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghostly 17th-Century sailing ship whose captain (Van der Decken in some versions) is doomed to sail for ever about the Cape of Good Hope, his punishment for blasphemy. Reported encounters with the phantom ship have not been infrequent: on 11 July 1881, for example, a sighting of the vessel was logged by the British warship Bacchante, whose lookout was the cadet officer later to become King George V.

2. Livingstone successfully evokes an eerie, uncomfortable, even dangerous atmosphere, by means of diction (alone – line 1, drifting – line 4), allusions (to the possibility of shark attack, for example: far beyond the sharknet – line 3 – and your dangling toes you hope not luminous from below – lines 7-8) and imagery: the salt-wet belly of your mistress the black ocean (lines 4-5).

3. There is a fascinating tension between the respect for the sea that all sensible people have who know it well, and the comfortable sense of belonging (dozing – line 9) that the poet feels far out on the ocean that he clearly loves.

4. The dramatic impact of the last six lines is achieved largely by the auditory images that intrude harshly into the quiet of the ocean, as the poet is reminded of the mysteries that the sea will never disclose.


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