R240.00
In Zero Summer, Simon van Schalkwyk creates a striking poetic landscape shaped by alienation, extinction and the sense of an era drawing to a close. Yet amid these looming crises, the collection remains daring, intimate and alive to the fragile beauty of contemporary existence. Ranging widely across themes, disciplines, nature and history, Zero Summer is a work of remarkable scope and originality, and a powerful contribution to contemporary poetry.
Description
Simon van Schalkwyk’s Zero Summer immerses the reader in a stark poetic landscape of alienation, extinction and the spectre of an ending era. Yet, despite these looming catastrophes, the collection is both daring and deeply human, offering a startling vision of contemporary life and its fragile, persistent beauty.
With an expansive intellectual range, Zero Summer moves fluidly across themes and disciplines, demonstrating the poet’s capacious imagination and sharp engagement with contemporary life. It traces the hidden connections that bind our inner lives to the larger forces of nature and history. A work of formidable scope and originality, Zero Summer stands as a vital contribution to poetry’s ongoing dialogue with the world it seeks to illuminate.
“Reading Zero Summer, I felt I was in the audience of a twenty-first century shaman, one able to capture the temper of global times, of our mass ennui, of millions of petabytes of unmemorable content, and turn it into rarefied, pastiche-free art. This is the work of serious poetry: sly, witty, sardonic, well-read and well-surfed, maudlin at the right times, and delicate yet tensile. And the shaman doesn’t browbeat us. ‘Look into it,’ he says, and leaves the room.” – Rustum Kozain