Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006 - Hardcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151015325 ISBN 13: 9780151015320

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007

Synopsis

J. M. Coetzee has described Breyten Breytenbach as "able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life." Windcatcher is a collection of Breytenbach's best work in poetry from 1964 to 2006, and includes many poems never before published. There are poems here from Paris in the sixties; poems written in prison, when Breytenbach was jailed in South Africa for seven years for his activities against the apartheid regime; poems of exile from New York in the nineties; poems from Vancouver, from Amsterdam, from Dar es-Salaam. Windcatcher is a remarkable record of a remarkable life and imagination. it is when night is at its deepestjust before morning that the muezzin calls the faithfulfor they are still asleepand his sad cry drifts over index fingers of minaretsrooftops and lovers and flowers and dockshis sad cry dawns over city  --from "Dar es-Salaam: Harbor of Peace"

About this title

From the Back Cover:

PRAISE FOR WINDCATCHER
 
?These poems explore, over the course of more than forty years, a life devoted to individual conscience in the context of Breytenbach’s native South Africa and of our troubled age, and to poetry and the relation between them. Altogether they comprise a daring and original testament unlike any other I know, one that is haunting, passionate, uncompromising, attuned to the sufferings and evanescent beauties of the present.”--W. S. Merwin PRAISE FOR BREYTEN BREYTENBACH
 
"The greatest Afrikaner poet of his generation."--The New Yorker
 
"[Breytenbach] write[s] with a wild heart and an unrelenting eye, and is fueled by the sort of rage that produces great literature." --The Washington Post Book World

About the Author:

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH was born in Bonnievale, South Africa, and currently divides his time between France, Spain, Senegal, and New York City. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department at New York University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0151015325
• ISBN 13: 9780151015320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192