Mantis Poets: Jack Cope and CJ Driver

Jack Cope is better known as a creative prose writer, but he admits that poetry came first with him and remains the medium to which he turns when there seems no other way to express what is in him.

In this volume he brings evidence of that quality of personal warmth' and 'the vividness and responsiveness of his phrasing to which his editor, Professor Ridley Beeton, points. 'Scenes, objects, experiences, people emerge from their finite world, and take up a new dimension in the perspective he creates. This is the mark of a noteworthy poet.'

Reading Jonty Driver's poetry is often a moving experience - for its sudden iluminations of openheartedness, insight and courage, and of pain and fear. He has been called a pessimist but determinedly claims the opposite; he has a fine lyrical gift but uses 'sparse and awkward rhythms', as he says, because he distrusts lyricism.

This collection, selected from poems written up to his middle thirties, is the first he has published, It should go a long way towards confirming him as one of the most striking poetic talents to come out of South Africa.

condition: good (cover lightly worn)