A chance to hear our very own poet in action

On Sunday 10th July at 4-00 p.m., in the church of Sr Mary, St Mary in the Marsh, as part of the John Armitage Memorial (JAM) Festival in the Romney Marshes, C.J. (“Jonty”) Driver will be reading his sequence of poems called BEFORE:  22 poems about his African childhood and young manhood, including the five weeks he was held by the security police in solitary confinement in South Africa in 1964.  In between some of the poems in the sequence, Peter Fields will be playing on the violin a variety of pieces - some classical, some folk, some popular.

This recital is a continuation of the very successful recital of 2015, also in St Mary in the Marsh, when Jonty read the sequence of poems called REQUIEM and Peter played a transposition of Bach’s Cello Suite No 2. BEFORE has been published so far only in a South African literary magazine in 2013, though a printed version of the sequence will be available at the recital for those who like to read as well as listen

Here is an example of what Jonty will be reading: 

 Number IV of XXII.

Odd that anyone should love a landscape

Most where he has never lived for long:

The greys and blueish greens, the flecks of white

Which pass as blossom on the bush, the twist 

Of twig and threat of thorn, the succulent 

Spread out to catch the slightest drop of dew,

The red-brown earth and slate-grey shale, the haze

Which makes the colours smear themselves like paint.

I note the detail first, and then the whole

Expanse of plain and upland to the edge

Of what a human eye can see. And though

Horizon is the limit of our sense

Beyond that feeble distance still there lies      

Horizon yet again, which stretches on

And on as if we couldn’t ever rest,

As if the distance called us farther still,

Beyond the edge, then to the edge again.

I raise my eyes, and wish that I could climb

This hill, and then the next, and so beyond,

Or walk that river-bed, or track that line

Of green and golden shrubs. If spirits walk,

It’s here that I shall hope to find myself,

A lanky ghost in old khaki, my shirt

Untucked to catch the breeze, my boots well-laced

And stout enough to deal with thorns, a stick

In case there are still snakes in paradise.

I’ll walk beyond the dam, beyond the sound

Of windmill clanking round and round, the splash

Of water on the upward stroke, the lap

Of ripples on the edge, to where korhaan

Crank-crank alarm as I get near their nest

And then towards the koppies far away.

I’ll pause to count the springbuck on the slopes,

To mark the way erosion shapes the hills,

And note the level heights where spirits dance

When all the sounding stones reverberate -

And then I’ll walk, and walk, to what I hope
May after all still turn to endless light.