Skinned: Selected Poems

by Antjie Krog

Krog identifies certain themes that have informed her work since her earliest days as a published poet: politics and the land, family, and being a poet.

Skinned opens with poems about writing within the intimacy of family and spans her life since she met her husband as a fellow classmate at school until their middle-age years being lovers, parents, and grandparents.

The second part of the selection is excerpts chosen from a volume containing a long epic poem based on the life of Lady Anne Barnard from Scotland, who accompanied her husband to Cape Town and lived in the castle from 1797 until 1802. This volume was written during the height of apartheid and she chose Lady Anne as a metaphor for exploring being white, privileged and on a continent that one finds beautiful while patronizing and looking down on those who live in it. Part Two therefore represents a colonial vision.

Part Three contains extracts from several speakers who lived in the land before the likes of lady Anne arrived. She has included interviews with inhabitants of the stone desert, three re-workings of Bushmen or /Xam narratives as well as a translation of an oral Xhosa praise poem.

Part Four represents the political turmoil of South Africa and parts of Africa. The poems come from volumes which explored how black people and whites identifying with the oppressed were removed from official history. The volume as a whole concludes by exploring imperatives on the poet, schooled within a western tradition, to learn "a change of tongue" in order to be.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Krog grew up on a farm, attending primary and secondary school in Kroonstad. In 1973 she earned a BA (Hons) degree in English from the University of the Orange Free State, and an MA in Afrikaans from the University of Pretoria in 1976. With a teaching diploma from the University of South Africa (UNISA) she would lecture at a segregated teacher’s training college for black South Africans.

She is married to architect John Samuel and has four children: Andries, Susan, Philip, and Willem. In 2004 she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape.

Reviews

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense, pungent, deeply honest poems unlike quite anything else I've read. Krog is confessional in a sense, but not the dramatic Sylia Plath, Freudian Sharon Olds, or detached/mythic Louise Glueck manner. She is unflinching in dealing with childbirth, menopause, sex, death, and the aging body - it's not often we see a "sonnet to hot flashes" or a "hormone sonnet" about estrogen replacement. The initial discomfort a reader might have seeing this on the page shows just how taboo, or unspoken and undealt with such issues are even in our confessional, oversharing society. Or, in Krog's words:

"God, Death, Love, Loneliness, Man
are Important Themes in Literature.
menstruation, childbirth, menopause, puberty
marriage are not."

At times, Krog's poetry seems somewhat consumed or even overshadowed by the poetics of disgust, by her desire to wrangle the taboo and lay it out on the page for all to see and be discomfitted. It makes the poetics a bit harder to evaluate (especially in translation), though her style - the breathless, overflowing, Germanic-compounded-word style - is arresting and original. Totally worth reading, both for style and substance.

[Mish Middelmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antjie Krog is a treasure. I love her trilogy about South Africa starting with The Country of My Skull and I love her poetry. This book is a selection from her work over four decades. Sometimes I found the breadth of its scope quite confusing and the switches between genres were for me quite a wrench. My experience ranged from the deep by-the-throat grab of her powerful personal poems through to the wake-up call of her digging at white privilege through the Lady Anne Barnard poems to some real stretching to connect with the work of griots, African praise poets and San narratives. Every part of the journey was illuminating.

I love the way she looks so directly at everything, from herself and the dramas of her body, heart and soul to her family, her marriage, her country and our past and present. And her use of language - including that all these poems are translated from their native Afrikaans - is masterful in creating on the page the very uncertainty and unknowability of many of the topics and truths she addresses.

[D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally I avoid reading one author collections of poetry (especially if I'm unfamiliar with the poet), instead opting for anthologies and finding poets that fit my desire from there. My main reason for picking up Skinned was the cover and I liked the first poem and assumed most would be in the similar vein; well that turned out to be wrong becuase in the middle of this book the poems turn towards the more historical and the metaphor of South Africa and healing the wounds of apartheid; then towards the end returns to the more personal, ruminating on menopause, aging and death. The Lady Anne sections and the poems focused on South Africa took more for me to get into, but now that I'm finished I can say Krog's clean, sparse style works extremely well.

[Sherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, a recommendation from Ashley led me to this while in South Africa. What I most liked is that it is a collection of poems she has chosen to be included those in a third of it are from translations of oral Sepedi, Xhosa and Zulu praise poems. The cover fold suggests Skinned "explores the necessity of a 'change in tongue' in order to be." I like that and I like how this collection felt on my tongue--and my heart.