The Journey Back, a travel-book in verse by CJ (Jonty) Driver (review by Lorna Challand)

The Journey Back.

Jonty Driver's collection of poems entitled the The Journey Back. A travel-book in verse describes his return to South Africa when his visa exemption had been restored after his exile in 1964. These poems are not just a  moving memoir of Jonty's life, family and friends in South Africa, they shine a light on what it means to be exiled from the country of one's birth and how, even after a successful and fulfilled life in an adopted country, one's longing for one's homeland never dies. The poetry is written in a variety of forms from sonnet to psalms with imagery of light and dark, birds, contrast and conflict, literary references and poignant memories of family and friends. 

Jonty refers to his poems as “fledgelings” which he nudges, “from the page” and images and descriptions of birds pervade the poems. In “Grahamstown 2.  Aubade”  he writes that the raucous call of the  Ibis hadedah, 

                     

                         “    of all the sounds I longed to hear

                               in years of exile from this place”

was the one he missed most. Cranes in the poem of that name are likened to elegant guests “As if at a Regency ball” and

                                                                                      

                                "......  ............Flamingoes. avocets

                                Darters, stilts, spoonbills, ibises”

enhance the beauty of the landscape in “Appearances” as does the imagery of light in “Written on Water” where,

                                                “The sheen of dying wind,

                                                  Across the lake -

                                                  The darkling light

                                                  As light delights the air”

 In  “Storms River” the beauty is seen in the wave's spray of spume which “Appends a rainbow briefly to its edge.”

In contrast to the beauty of South Africa, the poems also show its dark past and its violent present.  “Grahamstown 1. Balancing Act” contrasts the “white gabled” Grahamstown of Jonty's childhood  with the township “across the valley” with literary comparisons to Ulysses's visit to Hades and its likeness to a Hell that Dante  “Would have loved ”  The present violence is cleverly underpinned in the poem “Present Shock”  in the description of a theatre visit to Richard the Second, by the anxiety of the actor playing the role, fearing similar violence to that on stage on his journey home through “these streets at night”.

The elegy “Uplands School. White River,” where Jonty's father was Headmaster, conveys not only the grief and permanent loss of losing one's parent, especially when one has been separated by exile, but also the fear that,

                      “There is no God, there is no life to come,

                        There is no time when we shall meet again.”

But in a poignant ending his “blank-eyed misery” is alleviated by his daughter taking his arm, creating a feeling not of loss and ending but of continuity.

The poems in the collection dedicated to friends - writers, artists, activists - are at times sad but also uplifting They all played an important part in not only shaping and influencing Jonty's life but in bringing change to South Africa.  These tributes to them, to his family and to his homeland” he hopefully “nudges” like   fledgelings “To try their best in all that enormous air”. They soar,

            

                                “In profuse strains of unpremeditated art”