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Canary's Songbook
Author(s): Karen Press (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 24 Mar. 2005
- Language: English
- Print length: 128 pages
- ISBN-10: 1857547632
- ISBN-13: 9781857547634
Book Description
In The Canary’s Songbook Karen Press explores the inescapable shaping power of personal and public histories in individual lives and political processes. The theme has deep roots in Press’s native South Africa. The desire to find ancestors who can be invoked as sources of wisdom, or validations of unwisdom, is a central preoccupation of the poems, given force by Press’s understanding of South Africa’s continuing, painful dialogue with its own past. The Canary’s Songbook affirms the universality of such themes, placing Africa on its own terms within a global culture whose attractions and corruptions touch all, and in which individuals struggle to make whole lives from the fragments they inherit. Karen Press’s first Carcanet collection, Home (2000), was acclaimed by the South African Sunday Independent for its ‘finely wrought poems’ by one of our finest poets.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Karen Press lives in Cape Town. She has published eight poetry collections as well as mathematics textbooks and children’s books. Her poetry has appeared in journals in South Africa, Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, and in translation in French, Italian, Turkish and Tamil. She co-founded the publishing collective Buchu Books and currently works as a freelance editor and writer.
