Collected Poems: Don Maclennan, ed. Dan Wylie. Cape Town: Print Matters, 2013.
No Other World: Essays on the Life-Work of Don Maclennan, ed. Dan Wylie and Craig MacKenzie. Cape Town: Print Matters, 2012.
“Don Maclennan” is one of those rare names in South African literary culture that has attained talismanic status, evoking sighs, exclamations and first-hand oral reports from people who knew him, especially those who were lucky enough to sit in his literature classes over many years at Rhodes University.
For several generations of students in Grahamstown, where Maclennanacted as a lecturer and an occasional speaker fromroughly the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s, he was a teacher-poet who(it is widely reported) affected people uncommonly merely by the inspiration of his example.
Maclennan did this by teaching literature in the old way, reciting poems and talking aboutlife, poetry and philosophy. By all accounts, he wasa conversationalist second to none, and a legendary lecturer. His most abiding topic was the paradox that haunts and enlivens all his work: the barbarous beauty of sensuous life gathered up hungrily before the jaws of mortality.
I was not ever his student or colleague, and I met him only once, briefly. I encountered his poetryin the stark1988 collection, Collecting Darkness, which has the following opening sequence: “Slowly the land- / scape shrinks, / trees, shrubs / and boulders / collecting darkness / like country people / pulling blankets / round their shoulders.”
In those eight lines, Maclennan’s gift for lyrical condensation is evident: the rough-hewn but profoundly suggestive metaphor, the evocation of both feeling and thoughtful reflection, and, perhaps most impressive of all, the apparent lack of artifice.
These and many other facets of Maclennan’s poetic legacy have been brought to the fore in two companion volumes produced with a kind of curatorial dedication– one is tempted to use the term “lovingness” –that one no longer seesvery often now that “SA Lit” as a topic has largely fallen out of fashion in the local academy.
Together, Dan Wylie’s edited tome, Collected Poems: Don Maclennan (463 pp), and the accompanying volume, No Other World: Essays on the Life-Work of Don Maclennan(264 pp, ed. Wylie and Craig MacKenzie), make a fitting tribute to an artist who was as much neglected by his critical peers as he was revered by those who loved him and/or his work.
Maclennan was not universally appreciated. His poetry came to represent, in the hectic 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, an“idealist” counterpoint to “political” writing. This was a time whenthe work of poets like Maclennan and Lionel Abrahams wasgiven a brutally bad press by historical materialist critics.
Partly as a result, Maclennan’s work was neglected by both anthologists and academic scholars, as Craig MacKenzie’s essay in No Other World demonstrates.
In contrast, the two volumes under review have been produced with a kind of dedication and devotion that should make them either precious (to Maclennan devotees and general readers) or somewhat curious (to those less impressed with Maclennan’s “timeless” poetry about mortality amid deadly social conditions).
Such devotion does not, however, detract from the professionalism of Dan Wylie’s scholarly work in the fatter volume, and that of his co-editor, Craig MacKenzie, in the book of essays. Curating, collecting and editing the work of single authors whose work spans many decades is one of the more neglected skills in the literary academy, and these two books are therefore especially valuable.
The play in the title of the slimmer of the two volumes, which incorporates Maclennan’s“life-work” (i.e. his work as a human being, in both literature and life), in addition to a focus on his life (biography) as well as his work (scholarly essays on his writing), gives No Other World a broader remit than just a collection of academic essays would allow.
Many of the more personal recollections make for evocative reading – the essay by Maclennan’s wife Shirley stands out, as do Wylie’s own contributions, both those of a critical nature and the more personal touches.
On the whole, these twobooksspeak of a particularly rich form of isolation, of life “in a province” where erudition and a reaching after the numinous rubs up against the hard textures of a brutal, if excoriatingly beautiful, Eastern Cape environment.
Wylie’s edited collection, including all of Maclennan’s extant work across 20 published collections, is the kind of book one doesn’t “read” in any conventional sense. You live with it, keeping company with its spare, suggestive poems much as you keep company with a lifelong friend, or a local topography, intermittently returning to it with a special kind of savouring.
Thanks to the books at hand, Maclennan’s voice – at once compassionate, enquiring, impish, visionary and lyrical – lives on. Love him or hate him, he casts a significant shadow across the landscape of South African letters.
* Leon de Kock is professor of English at Stellenbosch University.