Deep South Publishing

7/7
The trees are coming into leaf today.
I tell you this slowly because you’ve never been outside.

(‘To my room’)

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But this interplay between the human and the non-human world is extended in poems like "To my room" and "Builders". Here Berold looks at the interface between the interior and the exterior worlds as personified poignantly through the character of his house, and specifically his room:

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morning half-light, meeting
two foxes on the farm road,
crossing the railway line, turning
to the white moon,
looking far down to my house,
seeing the lights on.

(‘Half-light’)

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Poems that bring together the human and the natural world in clear and simple terms:

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'All the Days' consists of three distinct sections. In the first part we encounter poems that deal in the main with Berold’s present on his smallholding outside Grahamstown.

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– his refined simplicity, his focus upon sharply defined and evocative imagery, a preoccupation with the natural world and the impermanence of the human – but here in this new book he pushes these elements further and deeper; both more deeply personal and less emotional at one and the same time.

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Robert Berold’s 'All the Days' is his fourth collection of poetry. The collection evinces all the characteristics of Berold’s trademark voice, so tellingly brought together in his last collection, 'Rain Across a Paper Field'

Robert Berold 2009

Cover Art: Tammy Griffin, 'Untitled 2000'

From the review by Kobus Moolman of 'All the Days' by Robert Berold, for 'New Contrast', 2009

For the full review, see Robert Berold's 'All the Days' book page on the Deep South website:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/all-...

3/3
African Life-Writing: Mapping Lives, Making Meaning. Date: Tuesday, December 9 |11AM EST | 8AM PST | 6PM SAST
Cost: Free | Scan the code to register or visit our Facebook page or catalystpress.org for the link.

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an opportunity to watch the podcast live in-the-making! Brooke will be moderating our Life Writing Panel, which will then air on Memoir Nation in January or February.

From the Catalyst Press post on FB and Insta:
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"Hey, folks! If you love memoirs like we do, or if you write memoirs (like some of us try to do), or if you're a fan of Brooke Warner and Memoir Nation (formerly Write-Minded, the podcast for writers that Brooke cohosts with Grant Faulkner), here's

'African Life-Writing: Mapping Lives, Making Meaning'

Featuring Colleen Higgs, whose 'my mother, my madness' (Deep South, 2020) book page, can be found here:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/my-m...

Cover Art: Amos Letsoalo, 'Fisherman'

"The rain" and "Inside the river" and "The oven of god" by Mangaliso Buzani from 'a naked bone' (Deep South, 2019)

For more, see:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/a-na...

6/6
And
the last thing he saw, as the black wave of the pit closed over him,
was a boat, a small wooden rowing boat, sailing empty-handed
into the sky.

(“The Solution”)

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Later, after the un-introduced “he” has determined to escape his home in a boat, a huge crack appears and swallows up the house, the street, him…

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Something was coming in, And going out again. Coming
in. And going out again. Unable to make up its mind. Something /
he could not see. Of unrecognisable shape. Something he sensed
only. With the hairs on his skin.

(“Moving”)

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The poet sets his scene with the section entitled “Home”–but what a home it is! This home is a spooky claustrophobic place, narrated in prose poetry and with the distancing of third person. The home, this house, is new, beautiful and modern…yet:

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The index shows a listing of three dozen or so poem titles and page numbers but like footsteps on a path, the pieces are not so much discrete individual poems as the parts of a larger whole.

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The phrase “light and after” suggests some sort of journey or exploration and that is how this collection reads to me.

Kobus Moolman 2010 © Val Adamson

Cover Art: Lyn Gilbert, 'Kokerboom Koppie'

From the review by Moira Richards of 'Light and After' by Kobus Moolman, for 'Rattle' (also published in 'New Coin'), 2011

For the full review, see Kobus Moolman's 'Light and After' book page on the Deep South website:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/ligh...

Cover Art: William Morris, 'The Strawberry Thief'

"Judgement day" and "From the accursed" and "Lamb of God" by Joan Metelerkamp from 'Requiem' (Deep South, 2003)

For more, see:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/requ...

Cover Art: Dumile Feni, 'Man Singing'

"DEDICATION (for the critic)" by Lesego Rampolokeng from 'Head on Fire' (Deep South, 2012)

For more, see:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/head...

Cover Art: William Kentridge, from 'Faustus in Africa'

Extracts from 'Slave Trades' (Deep South, 2000) by Ari Sitas

For more, see:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/slav...

11/11
One person, in their commentary on the letters, describes their visual composition, as one would a painting, and adds that they are “not really designed for correspondence.”

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Sometimes, there is a pane of glass so thick between speaking and understanding, between the human search for words and the listening ear.

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Instead of a woman removed from her loved ones, she is a madwoman, incurable, creating a piece of “art brut” that is, in Prinzhorn’s words, “the nearest to zero point on the scale of composition.”
The letters were never sent.

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Was Hauck going unheard the fault of the concept of “art brut” itself? “Outsider art”? By saying, “This is outside of me, my experience, my humanity,” is that where we decide to no longer listen, to deny someone a chance to exist as a person?

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They had been found in the archives of the University of Heidelberg and added to the Prinzhorn Collection. Some of the letters read simply, “komm, komm, komm.” Come, come, come. According to hospital records, she asked after her family relentlessly.

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They are the same words, written again and again, the same phrase, “Herzenschatzi komm,” hundreds of thousands of times: “Sweetheart, come.”
They were written by Hauck to her husband, Mark, who in the records was noted as “absent.” And they were never sent.

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Hauck’s letters, contained in this part of the collection, are sometimes so thickly crowded with words that they are illegible, parts of the paper plain gray where the words disappear into each other.