Reckonings, by Don Maclennan (used)

Don Maclennan (born 1929) is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His first collection of poems, Life Songs, was published by Bateleur Press in 1977, and his poems have appeared in New Coin, Contrast, Footprints, and The Bloody Horse.

The poems in Reckonings are specifically regional. They witness to the fact that they were made in the Eastern Cape, an area of extremes, of heat and cold, of drought and flood, of prickly pears and sweet figs. Growth is a precarious business and survival a bitter problem. Yet these poems are celebrating the unseen through the seen: they are about the human sanity of loving the earth from which we spring, loving what can be loved of this tormented society, and about exploring the minimal alternatives to revolution or complacent mysticism.

The core of this collection won a prize in the Department of National Education poetry competition in 1982.

condition: good (yellowed and worn cover)