BEFORE A new collection of poems by Jonty Driver

C.J.(Jonty) Driver's new book of poems was published in South Africa in August:  BEFORE, a sequence of 22 poems, published by Crane River in association with the Africa Sun Press. It was launched at the McGregor Poetry Festival in South Africa in August, and acclaimed. 

The sequence begins:

"Again the dream, or do I call it that?

A memory of other dreams, returned

Like shadows of a long-imagined past –

And so once more I write it down, in hope

That doing so might give it shape or sense -..."

Jon Cook, sometime Dean of Arts at UEA, says this: "There is an unusual honesty and courage about these poems. Beginning in memory or dream, or in the strange terrain between the two, they constitute an autobiography of the poet as a child and a young man. But recollection does not secure either the past or the continuity of the self..."

Vesna Goldsworthy, novelist and academic, says: "His South Africa can equally stand for my Eastern Europe, and so many other troubled parts of the world" and describes BEFORE as a "haunting, virtuoso sequence...woven of unreliable encounters with a lost self."

Copies of the book are available from The Rye Bookshop or for £5-00 + £ 2-00 p&p from jontydriver@hotmail.com  Also, Hilary Roome still has s for sale.