Understorey
Fiona Zerbst

February 2027
76 pp
200mm x 130mm with flaps
ISBN: 9781048300932

I am now the one who’s standing at the door.
Behind me are the pressing crowds who went before,
the clamouring masses of the recent dead
who want to be heard and voice the still-unsaid.
But I will be the one who turns the handle now,
the unlacquered brass that’s broken like a vow ..

In Understorey, her sixth collection of poetry, Fiona Zerbst journeys across continents, eras and memories to uncover truths about both the heart and the world we inhabit.

Balancing the deeply personal with the globally resonant – whether focusing on the salt-tinged South African coast or the steppe of post-Soviet Ukraine, where she lived briefly in 1995 – Zerbst ruminates on loss and the persistence of grief, but also the consolations of nature, art and human connection.

Her masterful use of form and language embraces everything from the flight of migrant butterflies and lingering family ghosts to the distortions of apartheid and landscapes torn apart by war.

Understorey is a luminous meditation on time, survival, and the music that endures to outlast us.

Fiona Zerbst was born in Cape Town in 1969. She is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including, most recently, In Praise of Hotel Rooms (2020).

She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria, was runner-up for the 2023 New Contrast National Poetry Prize, and was a recipient of the 1990 AA Life Vita/Arthur Nortje Memorial Award.

Her poems have been internationally published and anthologised, and some have been set to music by acclaimed composers Hendrik Hofmeyr and Juliet Wootton.

She has run her own writing and editing business for two decades, and lives and works in Cape Town.