THE BOOK OF UNREST
Nick Mulgrew

November 2022
58pp
200mm x 130mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-98690-8

Receding now, the floodwater masquerades as ocean.
Every day the intertide rises further, approaching
the horizon in a parallel band: the coast is leaking grey;
even the dullest shades of blue desert the ruined bay.

An ocean of floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural and human disasters of the eastern South African coast – and, in the process, himself.

An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted land-, city- and seascapes, increasingly hostile to those living in them. Drawing upon the wisdom of other Durban writers, Mulgrew interrogates the purposes of poetry and politics in such a fraught time and place. Can our traumas be learned from, or do they only shackle us to the past?

In turns elegiac and nihilistic, witty and desperate, sprawling and precise, these poems sift through personal and collective histories of mistrust and violence, to find what, if anything, can bring us rest.

Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban in 1990. He attended Rhodes University, Makhanda, and the University of Cape Town, the latter as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar.

He is the author of four previous books, including The First Law of Sadness, winner of the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Award, and the novel A Hibiscus Coast, longlisted for the 2022 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Among other things, he is a recipient of the 2016 Thomas Pringle Award, a runner-up for the 2021 Desperate Literature Award, and a finalist for the 2021 National Poetry Prize.

He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. He is the director of uHlanga.