Review
Home, Karen Press, Carcanet £6.95
Karen Press was born in Cape Town and has published six books there. This is her first in England. Her situations, political or erotic, are figurative, semi-surrealistic, parabolic and riddling.
The book opens with poems of intolerable longing that has the effect of strengthening but not satisfying the woman: “A thorn tree grows through her,/ pushing her upright”. There is a man who needs not just a roof but a mysterious lettered roof to shelter him. ‘Home’ is a recurrent need, a personal one with a big public question mark over it in South Africa. Jessei Tamboer, a black woman transported to the edge of the desert, cannot feed her family and sets herself on fire. For another “In the wind her door bangs open/ and then wide open./ Glass crashes./ She isn’t here/ She doesn’t come home”.
Friends huddle over the same fire, but in the morning there’s a hard space between them.
...and how many millions of people can one
person grieve for
day in and day out, worried that her books
won’t balance?
She has to lock the door at night, she’s alone.
Nature and countries are not homes, though their cold air can drum “the membrane of the first original only/ home/ echo of your natural self”. A child who swam happily in the amniotic fluid - probably the same who felt her parents were strangers - becomes an ice child and dies in the home outside “where they couldn’t see her”. Once home joined you vertically to the gods and the underworld, and horizontally to the traffic of the world.
Once all the continents were joined -
can you imagine?
Everyone walked in the same forest.
Now “every map is out of date” in a world of
exiles.
There’s a clotted and wordy quotation on
the cover:
Words are such thin shavings of the fractal
fruit,
tiny scrapings of the skin that holds
these joyously determined swirls of history
inside their juicy turbulence...
but don’t be put off: it’s totally uncharacteristic. In spite of some less convincing poems towards the end (and an early solecism like “who do you love”!), Press writes well on these big questions: cleanly, passionately and imaginatively.
Page(s) 63-64
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