FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT

by Stephen Peter Symons

“Stephen Symons’s new collection is engineered for flight, gliding its way between the heavy and the weightless, memory and forgetting. It is a self-proclaimed ‘language of feathers’ that makes this flight possible, a spiritual athleticism that brings to mind George Herbert, whose idea was that the ‘fall furthers the flight in me.’ Symons’s skill is in creating a fathomable sphere for the dimensions of war, contextualizing the enormous facts with small detail, whether referencing Amichai’s ‘diameters of bombs/and sadness of open closets’ or exploring the weightless dross of childhood in the beautiful piece ‘My son was conscripted.’ Symons creates an epicentre of violence by means of an exquisite prose poem sequence that reverberates even to the quietest poems in the book. But the work, as in all of Symons’s poetry, keeps thrusting us back into the present with all its perfect natural math as counter to aftermath: a child’s laughter; sunlight trickling over mossed stones; a ballet of cormorants. This is a beautiful book by one of South Africa’s most tender poets of witness.”

— David Keplinger, author of Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020)

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 2020

About the author

STEPHEN SYMONS has published poetry and short fiction in journals, magazines, and anthologies, both locally and internationally. His debut collection, "Questions for the Sea" (uHlanga, 2016), received an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His unpublished collection "Spioenkop" was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize for Poetry (2015, USA). His second collection, "Landscapes of Light and Loss", was published by Dryad Press in 2018, and his third collection, "For Everything that is Pointless and Perfect", was published in 2020 by Karavan Press and longlisted for a 2022 NIHSS Award. His poem "Sunrise with naartjies", also from the collection, won the ClemenGold®Writing Project. A selection of Symons's poems was anthologised in "The New Century of South African Poetry" (Ad Donker) in 2018. The poem "Small Souls" won the 2021 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Competition. His fourth collection, "Small Souls - New & Collected Poems", was published by Karavan Press in 2022. "Small Souls - New & Collected Poems" was shortlisted for a South African Literary Award in 2023 and longlisted for a 2024 NIHSS Award. His fifth collection, "THE ALGEBRA OF INSIGNIFICANCE", was published in 2024 by Karavan Press and longlisted for a 2025 NIHSS Award.

"AFTERBURN", a collection of short stories, was published by Tattoo Press in 2023. "Of Salt, Dust & Love" (Karavan Press), a second collection of short stories, was published in April 2025.

His debut novel, "Starlorn", is due for publication in 2026 by Karavan Press.

Symons holds a PhD in History (University of Pretoria), an MA in Creative Writing (University of Cape Town) and a B.Tech/NHD (CPUT) in Graphic Design. He lives with his family in Oranjezicht, Cape Town.