Lady One: Of Love and Other Poems - Hardcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151007624 ISBN 13: 9780151007622

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

Please deliver me, Lady, of prattle and cant
As I bury one hundred years of war and want

Evoking an extraordinary range of settings and images--from "Africa where blood blackens / and tiny desert creatures have to lick / the dew from their flanks to survive" to the havens of exile, and the "snow once again over Paris / this morning sheeting light / under grey blankets"--this searching verse explores love and loss, light and darkness, war and want, and wounds that do not heal. The texture of nostalgic, sometimes bitter memories of childhood in Breytenbach's African homeland is as palpable here as the vigorous exultation of love found amid the ruins of an earlier life. And pervading all the experience rendered is a sense of wonder and awe that "the light lies silvery smooth / in the furrows dug by the farmer / to lead astray the drought / and bring succour to the runner beans, / the maize, tomatoes, melons, peppers, / onions, garlic, potatoes / and love."

About this title

About the Author:

Breyten Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale, South Africa, in 1939. He settled in Paris, where he met and married Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien (to whom Lady One is dedicated). In 1975, after returning to South Africa illegally, he was caught and imprisoned. He was released in 1982, and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, a memoir of his prison years, appeared in 1985. Breytenbach lives in Paris and New York.

From Booklist:

A white Afrikaner who went to jail for opposing apartheid, Breytenbach has a dramatic political history, which he has written about in True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985) and other books. Ever the ironic iconoclast, he has attacked all political regimes, including the postapartheid leaders. Here he eschews the flags that "fib and sing" and "flap the wind." His focus is personal, the intimacy of the bedroom. There is no hint of irony in his love for his Vietnamese wife ("you are my sweetheart and I am so glad"), and the love poems speak with lyrical simplicity about the wonder of their finding each other. Their interracial union was illegal under apartheid ("for you I cut loose / my beautiful country") and the experience of exile is always here, whether they are in Paris, Vietnam, or the U.S. ("love oh my love how lonely our world!"). The poems' combination of the private and the global and, yes, the political--that sense of being alone together in no-man's-land--gives them their power. Hazel Rochman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0151007624
• ISBN 13: 9780151007622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84