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Isobel Dixon and the Poetic Menagerie in The Tempest Prognosticator (Plus Excerpt)

Matt Merritt interviewed Isobel Dixon about her new collection of poems, The Tempest Prognosticator, which has been called “a virtuoso collection” by JM Coetzee. Dixon discusses her preference for weather, animals and the quirks of human invention, as well as some of the writing that inspired her work. She names Damien Hirst’s Requiem, Eugene Marais’s The Soul of the Ape and The Soul of the White Ant, Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana as influences.

Read the interview, which comes with three poems extracted from the book: “Upupa Epops”, “Only Adapt” and “Paradox”.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this collection was the vividly African flavour of many of the poems, both in subject matter and in the language used. How often do you get back to South Africa, and do you find that an essential spark to your creativity?

I’m glad you can feel Africa in it, even though there’s a wider ranger of themes and settings than in the more overtly homesick and family-focused A Fold in the Map. There’s a lot more London, Yorkshire, England in The Tempest Prognosticator, partly reflecting how long I’ve lived and worked on this island. But South Africa remains essential to my life and writing. I go back twice a year, for publishing work and to see family and friends, and just to be at home in the Karoo for a while. My mother still lives in the house where I and my sisters grew up, and this old house and my home town Graaff-Reinet remain crucial places for me. I was thinking of it as I wrote as a harbour or dry dock and the phrase ‘refreshment station’ keeps popping into my mind – what the Dutch East India Company called the settlement at the Cape, a place for sailors to pick up fresh water and fruit and vegetables on their long sea journeys. A way to prevent emotional scurvy, perhaps…!

Paradox

There’s no telling what
will make the heart leap, frog-
like, landing with a soggy plop.
Love startles, makes a mockery
of us, and yet we lie awake
at night and croak and croak for it.

• Complete article: Polyolbion

Book details

• The Tempest Prognosticator by Isobel Dixon
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415201619
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy Saltpublishing

Cats: Book Excerpts, Poetry, South Africa
Tags: Beetle, Book Excerpt, Book Excerpts, Collection, Damien Hirst, English, Eugene Marais, Fish Fetish, Interview, Isobel Dixon, Mary Kingsley, Matt Merritt, Poetry, Polyolbion, Requiem, Robert Byron, South Africa, The Road to Oxiana, The Soul of the Ape, The Soul of the White Ant, The Tempest Prognosticator, Umuzi
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2011-12-28 08:05

Without doubt, one of the most picturesque parts of South Africa is the Klein Karoo.

Forget about Mick Jagger singing about getting his kicks on Route 66. There are far more kicks to be had sightseeing on Route 62, the road that winds its way through the Klein Karoo with mountains on either side.

My wife and I took our old Land Rover Discovery (the one where the spare wheel is prominently displayed on the back, not discretely underneath) down to the Western Cape from Johannesburg.

Fire, bottles and a Boxer

The first night we stayed on a farm just outside Colesberg, where the former stables for the horses have been converted into luxurious overnight accommodation. It does a roaring trade in commuters going north and south as the “halfway house”. In the old days, it would have been where your stagecoach changed horses while you partook of victuals and porter around a blazing log fire.

The second night we spent in Prince Albert, having gone through Meiringspoort and had lunch in De Rust. The restaurant introduced me to a practice widely used in the area which we now call multi-product marketing – don’t just sell banking but offer your customer insurance as well. In the case of this restaurant, besides the meal all kinds of articles were on offer from old bottles to travelling bags for your shoes.

Prince Albert in itself reminds me of Graaff-Reinet and Greyton. It has been discovered and done up, but still manages to retain the rustic tranquillity of a village in the middle of nowhere. The lodge where we stayed had a young Boxer called Baxter who kept us company at breakfast along with two “swallows” who spend half the year in Knysna and the other half in Shrewsbury in England. The local olive farm did good business with us since it became the principal source of Christmas presents for our friends in the Western Cape.

Next level

It was the following day that our trip took off to a different level. About ten minutes outside Prince Albert, you turn right onto a dirt road and go through the Swartberg Pass. It has to be one of the best drives you can do anywhere in the world.

The rocks have crazy patterns and come straight out of the earth. Then you go over the top and there in all its splendour is the Klein Karoo extending down the valley as a colourful patchwork of small farms. Driving down the dirt road through Groenfontein to Calitzdorp, we zig-zagged our way through farms and close to abandonded houses which suggest that life can be pretty tough and transitory if you are running a small agricultural enterprise.

At Calitzdorp, you turn onto Route 62 where we shared lunch with a pet ostrich at a cafe. Opposite was a church at the top of which existed a clock with arbitrary chimes that took you into a different world of time. We stayed on route 62 through Ladismith, past the radioactive springs and Ronnie’s Sex Shop and turned off at Barrydale to Swellendam.

A time before

That brief glimpse of the Klein Karoo made me realise that there was a life before management textbooks and all the jargon that they have created; before we called people human resources; before being part of the value chain and becoming customer-centric; before measuring return on capital employed and discounted cash flow; before psychometric testing and performance appraisals; before corporate governance and financial transparency; before the whole obsession with capital gains and growth in market share and earnings.

I guess the soul of the Klein Karoo can be summed up in the idea that you do not have to be an investment banker in Johannesburg, London or New York to lead a successful and worthwhile life.

You can be a pillar in your local community and live among beautiful surroundings instead. Die Hel – a place we chose not to visit off the Swartberg Pass – is when you lose sight of the fact that the ordinary can be very satisfactory. Hmm!

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MAJESTIC: Track a cheetah, incuding the famous Sibella, who was rescued from hunters.

There’s nothing more profound for a city slicker lapping up a game retreat experience than hearing the cry of a wild animal in the dead of night.

With Samara Private Game Reserve’s 28 000ha of indigenous vegetation providing safe refuge to a diverse range of creatures, it’s easy to soak up a rewarding nature experience in this Eastern Cape reserve surrounded by everything from endangered species like cheetah, Cape shelduck and Cape mountain zebra to much, much more.

But for my guide Shakemore Manzinde, a Zimbabwean who’s made Samara his home for eight years, the reserve isn’t just a place to see a lot of animals.

“For me it’s also for people who like fresh air and views, and at night there are no lights – so for stargazing you can look out and identify certain constellations”.

As a South African spoilt by wide open spaces, it’s somewhat comical to hear of a tourist perched on Samara’s impressive Eagle Rock outlook point, which takes in the sweeping vistas of the Camdeboo (meaning ‘green valley’), who once asked Manzinde if the distant mountains were still South Africa.

He adds: “From my point of view, other places just don’t have the views.”

Take a dedicated aardvark safari.

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A three-hour drive from Port Elizabeth, the reserve is located 20km south-east of Graaff-Reinet. The area contains four of South Africa’s seven biomes on one piece of land: plateaux grasslands, Nama Karoo, savanna and valley bushveld thicket.

This translates to a variety of game drives potentially offering different sightings. I passed up a five-hour stint with lunch out on the Camdeboo plains, opting instead for a three-hour drive up the rocky mountainside, whose desolate grassland houses over 200 blesbok, 400 eland, Cape mountain zebra and 200 black wildebeest.

On our descent the rough, steep mountain road soon sliced through one of our sturdy Landy’s tyres, necessitating a remarkably quick tyre change. Passing by a 700-year-old Karoo shepherd tree, a favourite staple for browsers, a black-backed jackal loped past looking for cover from the hot midday sun.

The habitat is also rich in spekboom, Portulacaria Afra, which grows predominantly in the Eastern Cape. The reserve has launched a project to facilitate the regeneration of previously over-grazed land through the planting of spekboom, which is thought to reduce the amount of damaging carbon in the atmosphere.

“If a million hectares were planted it would have the same carbon reduction effect as the Amazon basin”, informs Manzinde.

The region once teemed with game before the arrival of the 19 century settlers. Lion, elephant, cheetah and buffalo occurred in huge abundance, allowing the Camdeboo plains to house one of the biggest migrations ever to occur on earth.

CAMDEBOO: Shakemore Manzinde perched on top of Eagle Rock.

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Millions of springbok and black wildebeest crossed in search of better grazing, leaving a trail of dust for days. But the erection of agricultural fences and the massacre of animals for sport saw centuries-old game paths disappear along with the extinction of the horse-like quagga.

Now, with the construction of solar-powered water holes and natural springs, numerous animals have once again made this habitat their home.

“I even came across an African wild cat which is quite a rare thing to see, as it’s hard to find a real African wild cat,” adds Manzinde.

Carnivores occurring in the locale include bat-eared fox, striped polecat, small-spotted genet, brown hyena, caracal and leopard. Mammals range from scrub hares to reddish-grey musk shrews.

Rodents include African porcupine and the Namaqua rock mouse. You can see even toed ungulates like klipspringer, steenbuck, kudu, giraffe, mountain reedbuck, waterbuck, red hartebeest, blesbuck, nyala and bushpig. To add to their stock, there are also plans to get eight elephants in April.

To maximise a relaxing visit to Samara to soak up the tranquillity of the Karoo, guests can stay at three different lodges: The Manor House, whose services include a personal ranger, chef and butler; the central Karoo Lodge homestead; or the remote Mountain Retreat which entails a bit of a bumpy extended ride to get there, but the awesome seclusion, solitude and sense of peace make it well worth the journey.

In addition to the obvious rewards of a game drive, with over 220 species of birds occurring on the property, bird watching is a cinch. There are breeding pairs of Black Eagles, and on game drives down south, you are likely to see Kori bustard, secretary birds and a host of other raptors.

Also make sure you take a walk to explore the valley landscapes where rock art paintings of cheetah are preserved. Fossils dating back 250 million years can also be seen on a 10-minute walk from Karoo Lodge.

And with two aardvark every hectare, guests can head out after dark for aardvark viewing, or take a dedicated aardvark safari.

For nature lovers who’d love to get their hands dirty in a unique bush experience, Samara also offers volunteer programmes. The venue is also home to the SACT Tracker Academy,.

l Call 049 891 0558, or e-mail reservations@samara.co.za For the Tracker Academy, call 049 892 2244. For more, see www.samara.co.za

The writer was a guest at Samara. – Cape Times

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THE Department of Rural Development and Land Reform is to kick-start the year with R66m worth of payouts to cover land claims to various communities in the Eastern Cape after the programme stalled for several months in the 2010-11 financial year due to insufficient funds.

The department was allocated R7,3bn in last year’s budget for land reform after being forced to suspend aggressive land purchases in 2010 owing to a lack of funds. The priority for the department was to use the new funds to settle the estimated R500m it could not pay to willing land sellers.

Last month, Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti told land claimants in Graaff-Reinet, where he distributed R100m to beneficiaries, that all land claims would be finalised within 10 years.

The minister also promised to start settling all land claims below R5m to those who have opted for cash instead of reclaiming land.

Mr Nkwinti said yesterday that the timing of the payout later this month “will prove perfect for the parents who will be sending their children to school and tertiary institutions”.

The minister’s spokesman, Mtobeli Mxotwa, said land claimants who had been underpaid in Somerset East would also be receiving a R1,7m top-up to make up for a shortfall in their earlier payout last year.

The Somerset land claimants were forcibly removed from their former homes in Somerset East when the Group Areas Act was passed in 1950.

Mr Mxotwa said officials from the department would next week visit 368 families in Tyutyu village, near Bhisho, to finalise payouts totalling R26m to the victims of forced removals in the area.

The families will be receiving between R56377 and R95303 in compensation for lost properties.

While some of the families lost their homes, there were those who were not compensated for arable or grazing land. The families were forcibly removed to accommodate the now-defunct Ciskei homeland when it was granted “independence” in 1981.

Skobeni village claimants, near Bhisho, will receive R23m, while Balasi village claimants, also near Bhisho, will be paid R16,3m for the loss of their homes when Bhisho became the capital of the Republic of Ciskei.

radebeh@bdfm.co.za

Maqetuka is among 12 young men who are vying for the glory and honour of being crowned the most handsome man in the country.

The 28-year-old filmmaker from Rondebosch, Cape Town, is the only black contestant left in the competition.

He eliminated hundreds of other hunks and made it into the final dazzling dozen.

Mr SA will take place on March 17 in Johannesburg.

Describing himself as creative, the IT specialist-turned filmmaker, who is directing, producing and presenting a mobile show called Zane Ke Bozza, says he is looking forward to putting his Eastern Cape hometown of Graaff Reinet on the map as victor on the night.

He is not only brainy, he is graceful as well.

Maqetuka is well-proportioned, broad-shouldered, deep-chested and has pleasing and impressive muscular contours. Amazingly, this is his first competition. Why has he decided to enter the competition only now?

“My friends said I should enter. I don’t regret it because it has taught me a lot about people and myself.”

This is the first beauty competition the high-end fashion model has ever entered.

He says his brains, beauty and charm have helped him to make it this far in the contest.

It also took diligence and a belief in himself to get so far in the competition, he says.

Maqetuka, who is his mother’s only child, says he wants to make his mother proud by winning.

“She has always been there for me. She single-handedly raised me and made me the man I am today. I want to make her proud by winning,” he says, blushing.

He adds that since he entered the competition life has been a lot more interesting and fun through his meeting other Mr SA contestants.

“I don’t just want to be a handsome face, I want to be the ultimate ambassador for young men who will look up to me. It’s important not to take yourself too seriously and to just enjoy the competition.”

He says Mr SA is not just about looks, but also about confidence and good character. He stresses that it is not about being cocky.

Mr SA contestants are judged on a whole lot of aspects that go to determine the ultimate SA ambassador.

This is just the beginning, though, for Maqetuka. He still has to help raise funds for charity organisations, do social upliftment work, speak around the country and campaign for votes from the public to secure an automatic top-five placement for the main event.

Maqetuka says he hopes that many of his friends and family members will vote for him before the last round.

“I appeal to everyone to vote for me. I promise that I will be a good ambassador and not only in the country. I will also represent my country well in other world competitions.”

The eventual winner will go on to represent South Africa in the Mr World contest later in the year.

To vote for Maqetuka, SMS Mr SA 144 to 34008.

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