Poetry
A Littoral Zone
Douglas Livingstone · 1991
Synopsis
A single day of sampling, “mythical” according to the author's notes, along the coast of Durban: the poems follow the order of the stations where the sampler stops, and their titles carry the number, like “Cells at Station 11” or “A Visitor at Station 21”. At each stop, the bacteriologist's record and the poet's gaze move forward together, and the present moment is set back within the long time of species and coasts.
Context
The book appeared in Cape Town in 1991 from Carrefour Press, after some twenty-five years of work; a map at the end of the volume locates the twenty-six stations, and the poet himself invited readers to read it as a single long poem. Julia Martin sees in it an ecological practice, where the bacteriologist's knowledge and the poet's meet with irony, equanimity and wonder; Johann Kahl follows in it the self-portrait of a man who looks at himself with irony.
Who it is for
A long poem to be read in order, like a journey; the vocabulary of bacteriology recurs often in it.
Prizes and reception
Julia Martin judged it, twenty years after its publication, to be prophetic for the region as for the rest of the world.
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