"In Time" by Douglas Reid Skinner: Literary Society Zoom Meeting 18 June 2021

 The Lit. Soc were pleased to welcome once again a man dubbed the poets’ poet, the well-travelled South African, Douglas Reid Skinner, whose vigorous audience engagement and sonorous recitations on his previous visit are still warmly remembered.  Would Zoom critically diminish that force field of personal magnetism?  The title In Time was to cover a miscellany of themes from his own oeuvre. He set the stage with musings on his collection The House in Pella District published in 1985.  Pella, a small village in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, sits amid a landscape of desolate beauty and is deeply rooted in the past.  The Bushmen, very much yesterday’s men,  still live there along side modern, commercial mining interests who drill ever deeper into the area’s rich geological past in pursuit of minerals and semi-precious stones.  Ostensibly following in  the tracks of 18^th century explorers, Skinner is aware he is stalking himself.  He visits his birthplace, Upington, the fertility of whose farms’ soil benefits from the rich, alluvial silt of the Orange River.  After going to the hospital in which he was born, he recounts in The Visit his return to his now dilapidated and abandoned childhood home.  Approaching it in remorseless heat which melts the tar on the road, he studies the photo held in the palm of his hand;

it shows two people smiling at a child

at play on blankets spread beneath the trees 

the world seems made of found and fallen things.

    This was the first place where he lived.      

Having started on childhood, families and memory, Skinner  continued unpacking the theme of time in the 1980s by studying the ancient geology of the Cape with stone functioning as a book whose pages were the layers of botanical history i.e. deep time.  A complementary objective in this endeavour was the constant search for self, for a new vision emerging from the weighty complexity of the past.  The speaker admitted to conscious imitation of the Leakeys in Kenya and Richard’s transition from safari ranger to palaeontologist.  The poem On Time records how the hiatus created by an hour’s wait for a train presents the opportunity to study the raw, elemental geology of Glencoe during its first winter snowfall, after a short crow’s flight into a fast fading past  from his softer, coastal lunch stop.  The glacial pace of change in the surrounding rock formations contrasts sharply with a hawk striking ,,,,the hawk that suddenly falls down gravity’s steep wall.   Heaven was inspired by an exploration of Western Cape with a friend where they encountered more extraordinary rock formations on a particularly memorable stretch to Cape Point.  It was encouraging to learn of Hieronymus Bosch’s belief that death was not a prerequisite for admission to Heaven and to hear of the heritage left by the area’s Huguenot pioneers, who must have found the wine industry they established at Franschhoek mitigated the austerity of their Calvinism.   

An inveterate globetrotter, 1979 found Douglas in a tribe for whom stoned had an entirely different meaning as he commuted to work in a New York clearing bank via   the Staten Island ferry, but even adrift on a sea of financialised froth his Muse did not desert him as his moving rendition of December, New York Bay neatly illustrated. Heading West, a visit to Point Reyes National Park north of San Francisco, inspired Blue Dragon Flies  which had the poet ruminating on time frames of a completely different scale, of perennial fertility cycles and the budding of the notion that each thing has its own time.  

Even with the filter of Zoom in place, the music of our speaker’s finely measured lines and the X-ray clarity of his gaze still won over the audience while his thought provoking material provided plenty of philosophical biltong to chew over long afterwards.

 William Doherty