Poetry
One Life
Sydney Clouts · 1966
Synopsis
The only collection published in its author's lifetime. His poems, nourished by the memory and images of Cape Town and the country, are striking for the strangeness of their images and open onto metaphysical and biblical concerns, in the manner of Henry Vaughan and John Donne; critics have sometimes reproached them for leaving aside the social questions of their time.
Context
The collection appeared in 1966 from Purnell and Sons, when its author was already living in London: he received the Olive Schreiner Prize without being able to come and collect it, and the Ingrid Jonker Prize was presented to him at home. Dan Wylie regards him as perhaps the most modernist of the South African poets of his generation. His collected poems, enlarged, appeared in 1984 in Cape Town from David Philip, and the journal English in Africa devoted an issue to him the same year.
Who it is for
Poems in English, brief and dense, with unexpected imagery; a demanding poetry, more meditative than social.
Prizes and reception
Ingrid Jonker Prize, which honours a first book of poems, and Olive Schreiner Prize, in 1968.