LIMINAL
Douglas Reid Skinner

August 2017
72pp
200x130mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-76256-4

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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.

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.