VOICES FROM ANOTHER ROOM
Stuart Payne

September 2018
54pp
130mm x 200mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-81226-9

DISTRIBUTED ON BEHALF OF CRANE RIVER

--

You could speak to me, or not,
and buy an ice cream as you did
on other days beneath blue skies, a
mid the sounds of other lives,
or I could speak, if you preferred,
or neither say a single word.

--

The carefully modulated surface of Stuart Payne’s poems belies the intriguing, startling and thought-provoking depths of thought and perception. Such deliberate tensioning between the obvious and the hidden allows him to craft finely judged poems that reward rereading. Whether evoking the touch of the sun or the sound of an old tape recording, his universe is both vivid and uncertain as past, present and future are considered and reconsidered, and the distance between minds is sensed and explored.

“The distinctive atmosphere of Voices from Another Room is elegiac and nostalgic, the occasional emotional use of rhyme recalling Auden. The sense of a lived life is moving, with loss and absence the major themes. Payne can also tell a story and paint a picture, the South African landscape occasionally opening out into a Mediterranean vision, while never losing sight of an ironic detail, as when “a cat… kneads a lap”. This is an original voice in South African verse, and readers will want to keep his book within reach, “to recreate a world of missing words”.” – Tony Voss

Stuart Payne was born and lives in Cape Town, where he's volunteered for the Off the Wall poetry group and Stanzas magazine. He studied English at the University of Cape Town, later taking French classes at the Alliance française du Cap. He has helped with animal rescue, but spent much of his life under medical care for OCD and depression. He had two poems commissioned by AVBOB in 2019 and was the winner of the 2022 New Contrast National Poetry Prize for his poem “Words for Dia!kwain”.