A SHORT TREATISE ON MORTALITY
Douglas Reid Skinner

June 2022
88pp
200mm x 130mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-98689-2

So many years had to disappear
before you found the book once more
that kept you glued one night for hours
to where you’d found the poem you felt
that you would always rue

because it seemed so perfect then
and seemed to frame near everything
that the author had wanted to say.
If only it was me, you’d mused,
if only I could write that way.

In Douglas Reid Skinner’s eighth book of poems, a 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.

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, including this title, and an edition of new and selected poems, as well as numerous translations. He is currently well known among South African poets as the editor of Stanzas magazine, and the English editor and translator for the AVBOB Poetry Project.