"Still Further" by Jonty Driver

 Jonty Driver has published this collection of eighty of his poems written over the past twenty years since he retired from teaching. They were selected by our June speaker, Douglas Reid Skinner (see below), who acted as editor and who helped to organise them for publication. A copy of the "flyer" will be attached to the next Winchelsea Literary Society newsletter. If you aren't yet on the mailing list, and would like to see this, which includes a summary of Jonty's life and career and details of how to obtain the book, please e-mail me at lawrenceyoulten@gmail.com 

Here is a review, written by Rosie Irvine, for the Ewhurst Parish Magazine, and reproduced here with her kind permission:

"Jonty Driver is a regular member of the congregation at St James’s. He moved to East Sussex with Ann after he retired from teaching in 2000. He was born in Cape Town in 1939 and was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4, and this led to him being detained in solitary confinement by the security police. He became stateless when the renewal of his passport was refused while he was studying at Oxford.

Eventually he became a British citizen, but he was not allowed back into South Africa until after apartheid had ended, many years later. His last collection of poetry was So Far: Selected Poems 1960-2004, and now we have Still Further: New Poems 2000-2020.

A large part of Jonty’s heart is still in South Africa where he grew up, and like other poets before him, such as Louis MacNeice, he is never wholly at home now in either his country of birth or in his adopted land. As he writes in ‘Sunset & After’,

"I’ve journeyed back from where I don’t belong

to where I also don’t belong."

In this book we travel with him to South Africa and across its vast expanses of veldt, and then suddenly we are back at Orchard Cottage with

"White wisteria

over an old oak door:

snowfall in midsummer."

It seems to me that the poems from South Africa are perhaps more anguished, because of the injustices and brutalities of its history, and because Jonty was forced to leave behind the country and his dear family and friends.

Many of the poems face up to old age and the ever-approaching prospect of death and the questions of faith that this gives rise to, and he says in ‘Rhyming Runes for Magical Dan’,

"About the final letting go

we can’t pretend to know."

They are searingly honest (and not for the faint-hearted!), revealing far more of the inner man than most of us perhaps choose to reveal.

‘Extracts from a Diary’ is a meditation on the poet’s mortality, written in hospital where he knows that

"The obituaries will tell those who read them a few partial truths"

But then we follow him on a slow recovery in ‘Walking Along New Road’, tucked away in this corner of East Sussex where our knowledge of the location is an added bonus for the local reader. And similarly there is a lovely sequence of poems about the Romney Marshes, including ‘Chorus’ which begins,

"Sing we our songs of the Romney marshlands

compost & leaf mould, silt, shingle & sand"

Interspersed through the collection are love poems for Ann, including ‘An Old Man & His Wife’ and ‘Song of the Sparrows’, written during lockdown ‘in the plague year, 2020’ which ends,

"I turn to you, as always, love,

who feeds the birds and knows each name;

we’re both aware what waits for us,

but tend the garden, just the same."

There is a poignant ‘Song for the Grandchildren’ that beautifully captures the fleetingness of childhood with its joyful, spontaneous play. And a poem ‘For My Dead Brother’ after the famous Catullus 101 (‘Atque in perpetuam, frater, ave atque vale’) that ends,

"I face the fact: I too must die

so greet you now: my last goodbye."

And there are many loving tributes in memory of old friends. So this is a collection that is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, but that is ultimately a tribute to the places where Jonty has lived and to all the people with whom he has shared his long and interesting life.

Rosie Irvine

Signed copies of Still Further can be obtained from Jonty. Please send a cheque for £7.50 (p&p inc) plus your postal address to him at Apple Yard Cottage, Mill Lane, Northiam, RYE, TN31 4JU