Lesego Rampolokeng’s latest collection reveals a poet who is adept at harsh, harrowing imagery and flights of sonic beauty, writes Gwen Ansell.
A HALF CENTURY THING by Lesego Rampolokeng (Black Ghost Press)
Back then, in the Horns for Hondo days, it would have been as hard to imagine Lesego Rampolokeng as a 50-year-old elder statesman of South African literature as Martinus van Schalkwyk as an ANC Cabinet minister. Both came to pass. The former has turned out rather better than the latter.
A half century thing marks Rampolokeng’s 50th birthday with his eighth poetry collection, joining a novel, musical jams (with the Kalahari Surfers, Louis Mhlanga and the late Zim Ngqawana, among others), movie and theatre scripts, and more. But it all started with the Congress of South African Writers in the early 1990s: an era when there seemed to be an aspiring poet on every impromptu stage.
Not everything produced back then has stood the test of time. Rhymes that electrified in a live performance space sometimes limped, stumbled and fell flat on the printed page; it wasn’t their intended medium.
Besides, at that historical moment, the content and act of poetry mattered more than the form. What counted was that lips sewn shut by censorship and oppression were ripping themselves open to sing.
Rampolokeng’s work was different. If we define a poet as someone who crafts and patterns words so that they can say far more than when they rest in anomic solitude in the dictionary, then right from the start, he was a poet. “It’s about the word,” he proclaimed. His lines sounded great to the ear, and read equally beautifully in print.
“I haven’t arrived at the positive yet,” he told a questioner at this year’s National Arts Festival. Although he remains the most accomplished and accurate cartographer of our tortures, torments and betrayals, I’m increasingly asking myself where the new poets are who can similarly map our joys.
See full review by Gwen Ansell in the Mail & Guardian
