Cover image by revel j fox
Five years after the publication of Liminal, uHlanga is proud to announce the publication in June 2022 of A Short Treatise on Mortality, our second title by Douglas Reid Skinner, and the poet’s eighth title overall.
Despite being based in England, Skinner is already very well known among South African poets as the editor of Stanzas magazine, and as the English language editor of the AVBOB Poetry Project. (And, in the late 80s and early 90s, the director of Carrefour.)
Here, in a surprisingly humorous volume, Skinner’s lifetime of writing becomes the writing of a lifetime. With verse ranging from the philosophical to the surreal, Skinner ponders the most universal of questions and concerns – how to live, and, perhaps more crucially, how to die.
Through landscapes of ploughed fields, dream highways, and building sites alike, our human concepts of memory and literature are observed, retraced, or even deconstructed. Behind the easy intelligence and humour, Skinner remains a flagbearer for the traditions of South African poetry in English. Poems are written for writers and loved ones who have passed, others for those who have most of their years to come – all held in expert balance by a master of his art.
Author photo by Carol Voss
Douglas Reid Skinner was born in Upington in 1949, and went to school in Makhanda (Grahamstown), Kimberley and East London. For a living, he has worked variously as a driller and miner in the Northern Cape, a programmer and systems analyst in London and the USA, a publisher in Cape Town, a fine wine trader in England, and in house refurbishing and maintenance in Surrey, where he lives at present.
He is the author of seven collections and an edition of new and selected poems, as well as numerous translations.
A Short Treatise on Mortality is available in and to order from good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana from June 2022. Like all of our books currently in print, it will also be available overseas through the African Books Collective.
For press and copies, mail nick@uhlangapress.co.za.