Cover design based on a drawing by Cleone Cull
uHlanga is proud to announce the upcoming publication of Liminal, the seventh collection of poems by Douglas Reid Skinner.
Why do we keep anything?
All morning I hear the pages
rustling softly in the stacks.
Autumn comes to all leaves.
This seventh collection from one of South African poetry’s under-appreciated masters is possibly his best yet. Metatextual, meticulous and deeply steeped in sentiment, Liminal is an exquisite and at-times startling rumination on lives lived, loves loved and writings written.
Skinner’s technical mastery of his style and craft, honed over the decades, only brightens the emotions that run through a mélange of travel poems, remembrances, experiments and treatises on the nature of being, literature and friendship. A testament not only to his exacting eye and appreciation of that which has (and those who have) come before him, but also to an unending adaptability and an unerring desire for growth.
Photograph by Cleone Cull
Douglas Reid Skinner was born in Upington. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry – Reassembling World, The House in Pella District, The Unspoken, The Middle Years, Blue Rivers and Heaven: New & Selected Poems – as well as four books of translation, most recently The Secret Ambition: Selected Poems of Valerio Magrelli, translated from the Italian with Marco Fazzini. He directed The Carrefour Press from 1988 to 1992 and was editor of New Contrast from 1990 to 1992. He is co-editor of Stanzas.
Liminal is set for release in August 2017. Launch dates are as follows:
14 August: Book Lounge, Cape Town
16 August: David Krut Cape Town, Montebello Design Centre, Newlands
23 August: Kalk Bay Books, Kalk Bay
30 August: NELM, Grahamstown
More information about the book may be found here.
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