Books

A Fold in the Map (UK: Salt 2007; SA: Jacana 2007)
Weather Eye (Carapace 2001)

Pamphlets

Ask for It by Name (unfold press 2008)
Unfold (2002)

A Fold in the Map

One of my favourite books, Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere inspired the title of my new collection A Fold in the Map. In this book, which resonates somewhere between history and travel book, she meditates on the city and so much more, using the phrase to describe the in-betweenness of travellers; something I feel very strongly.

This feeling comes through in the first half of my collection, where many poems were written looking back to South Africa from Scotland and England, to the climate and people and creatures I still miss.

The second half – after the ‘fold’ in a way – is about a person I miss very much indeed, at a distance that can’t be changed by a long-haul flight. My father, asthmatic and often ill, but unfailingly cheerful, died in 2002 and the poems here are about him, his illness and death, and of course also about my four sisters, and my mother, the women who loved him.

Weather Eye

Weather Eye began as a manuscript that won the unpublished section of the Sanlam Prize in South Africa in 2000. Gus Ferguson of Carapace published the collection in 2001 and it won the Olive Schreiner Prize, administered by the English Academy of South Africa, in 2004.

Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of An African Farm, is one of my literary heroines, so this was a particular thrill. She also loved the landscape of the Karoo – she lived in Cradock and is buried on a hilltop in the area, close to where I grew up, in Graaff-Reinet.

The wonderful South African artist and designer Lynne Stuart made Weather Eye into a very beautiful book, and also designed two striking pamphlets: Unfold and Ask for It by Name.

Ask for It by Name

Poems by Simon Barraclough, Olivia Cole, Isobel Dixon, Luke Heeley, Liane Strauss and Roisin Tierney. "A well-stocked anthology of fresh produce from six prize-winning poets. Behind the bottles and the butter you'll find Mussolini cheating on the tennis court and meet the shark from Jaws in a Yorkshire millpond; glimpse the love of woman for orang-utan and make it across the Spanish-Italian border; spy on the hobbies of cowboys and drink deep of the Molotov cocktail of love..." (from the back cover) £5/€7,00

Unfold

Poems by Simon Barraclough, Helen Clare, Andrew Dilger, Isobel Dixon and Roisin Tierney. Another stunning design from Lynne Stuart and now quite a collectors' item with only a handful left.