Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006

by Breyten Breytenbach

J. M. Coetzee has described Breyten Breytenbach as "able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life." Windcatcher is a collection of Breytenbach's best work in poetry from 1964 to 2006, and includes many poems never before published. There are poems here from Paris in the sixties; poems written in prison, when Breytenbach was jailed in South Africa for seven years for his activities against the apartheid regime; poems of exile from New York in the nineties; poems from Vancouver, from Amsterdam, from Dar es-Salaam. Windcatcher is a remarkable record of a remarkable life and imagination.

it is when night is at its deepest
just before morning that the muezzin calls the faithful
for they are still asleep
and his sad cry drifts over index fingers of minarets
rooftops and lovers and flowers and docks
his sad cry dawns over city
--from "Dar Harbor of Peace"

Genres: Poetry, South Africa, African Literature

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

and sometimes lightning flashed from your lips
and sometimes your syllables were a caressing rain,
enjambments of rain over pale hillsides of the woman,
the times of her time when you were voice only,
[…]
voice is of the wind in the trees at night
do they not know you cannot spear the heart?
*
[…] but also that I’ve come to recognize rooms of loneliness,
the soiling of dreams, the remains of memories,
thin wailing of the violin
where eyes turn away to look ever further,
ears mouse-quietly listen inward—
*
how often were we here
where only silver shadows stir
only through you I had to deny myself
through you alone I knew I had no harbor
in a burning sea
*
sweet and somber breath streamed all night through my window,
and the silver bracken of the moon — and other matter
throbbed in space — tatters, snapshots, flitting memories,
filaments of what we never could gather furnished the dream —

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

to the sea we cannot go back
the sea has grown old
with white wrinkles and foam around the lips

we cannot return to the desert
there's violence behind the dunes
ant fortresses on their way to war
in pale valleys the jackals trot through light nights
each within the cool zareba of his shadow steps

all borders are now fronts and fire lines
we are well up shit creek

here we shall dawdle
where the suburbs have been leveled
and soiled grave diggers live in cellars
transparent as if of the present
self-contained like faucets
deaf to their own dripping
the blind things devouring corpses
with nothing new to show
except second-mouth false teeth

here the hands of sextons
are shivering with wrinkles and the foam
from dark corpses they had to wash
perfuming bridegrooms for the bridal bed

here we tumble
implosively
to new interior boundaries

[Danielle DeTiberus · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of poems spanning over forty years and many continents. Breytenbach has certainly proven himself as a fine example of the poet of duende, the deep song, and the deep image. The poems are political not like those of so many poets writing today (without life experience to back up the work), but in a vein similar to many South American poets who’s use of fantastic images, folklore, and memory create the kind of disjointed narrative born of modern imperialism and brutality. Some poems notable poems include: “there is life,” “for the singers,” and “not with the pen but the machine gun.”

[Michelle]

heart-breaking. sublime.