Seasonal Fires

“No one among the poets of South Africa felt more acutely the heart-pain and shame of life under apartheid, or has notated more scrupulously the faltering joy that came over the country when the weight was lifted.”

– J. M. Coetzee

“Ingrid de Kok's poetry leaves me defenseless. I cannot respond to it as a friend, or reviewer, or journalist, or academic. It goes straight to my poetry heart. And I respond like a fool.”

– Antjie Krog

“Read these poems to yourself late at night, in the early morning before anyone else is awake, as you wait for a friend or the train. Read the words aloud and allow each to linger on your tongue: histogram, grace, grenade. Read them and register what the best poetry does without pretense or apology: it gives us back our lives.”

– Susan Rich, Cape Times

“In her first U.S. collection, with selections from the last 25 years, the plain words of South African poet de Kok are always personal, bringing close both veldt and city as well as the intimacy of a loving home (her mother 's "house hold"). Apartheid politics is part of it. She remembers growing up in the "closed rooms" of white privilege in a mining town near Johannesburg, and some of the recent poems address directly the elemental amnesty hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (a bullet in a child's chest rips into the heart of a house; nothing can restore the "unweeping mother"). Everything comes together in "Miners," where a white child goes underground to see her father's work ("the ear-blistering hard jabber of the jackhammers / cracking the center of the earth"), and just on the edge are the migrant "underground" black laborers, eardrums blown, rattling in a cage, their children far away. Intense, never preachy, these poems will touch many readers.”

– Hazel Rochman, Booklist