PEACH COUNTRY
Nondwe Mpuma

April 2022
54pp
200mm x 130mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-98688-5

Shortlisted for the 2023 NIHSS Award for Best Poetry

In summer, a time of plenty,
I spread leaves like puzzle pieces.
I want to create an Eden forever green.
Recreate that moment between man and serpent.
The breeze is disobedient, and the leaves fleet away like dust.

With exquisite clarity and poise, Nondwe Mpuma’s debut collection guides us through dreamscapes of ritual, harvest and destitution – of tornado-stricken villages, mythical beings, and the eternally evanescent promise of love.

Grounded by understated and precise verse, Mpuma weaves together the spiritual and the natural with effortless, imagistic flair. In Peach Country there is celebration, mourning, meditation, prayer, exploration, impatience and joy; throughout, however, Mpuma maintains an open-eyed wonder at the entirety of existence, viewed from her particular, and particularly enchanting, corner of the world.

Nondwe Mpuma was born in 1995, in Lubaleko, emaXesibeni, on the rural plains of the Eastern Cape. A Mellon Mays Fellow during her undergraduate studies, Mpuma has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Western Cape, and is currently a lecturer at the same institution.

The winner of the 2017 Patricia Schonstein Poetry in McGregor Award, Mpuma has been published widely in South Africa and abroad. She is currently one of the organisers of The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Society, based in Cape Town, where she lives.

Peach Country is her first book.