The poet John Mateer has published previously in South Africa, where he comes from, Australia, where he now lives, and Indonesia, which he has traveled in. A group of his poems about Japan appeared here last year in a small bilingual edition following a visit to this country, and has been incorporated into his new collection. Mateer's style is plain, but the references and content are often quite abstruse.
The opening section of the book is called "Makwerekwere," a South African term of insult for poor immigrants from other parts of the continent. "Uit Mantra," a set of three poems here, is about the Cape Malay community of Muslims. "Uit" in Afrikaans, I am told, means "out" or "from," and entrapment or escape is thus implied. Mateer, though not himself a Muslim, invokes heroic figures of the local Muslim tradition. In the third poem of the set, he meets a scholar of that history, but concludes "I . . . am a poet, another name for emptiness."
Emptiness, along with blackness and whiteness, are themes that resonate throughout the book. Another suite of poems, "Ethekweni," considers the roles of different people (poet, tourist, prostitute) in the New South Africa, and worries about the ethics of individual encounters. In a further poem Mateer calls up a landscape "as the home -- and heartland that isn't mine, the chiasm / of my African being." Keys, chains and fences emerge as the symbols of this restrictive world.
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