Unleaving, Ingrid de Kok’s seventh collection of poetry, speaks of private grief, personal loss, ambiguity and hope, writes Finuala Dowling.

Unleaving
Ingrid de Kok
Fourthwall Books, 2024

The international recognition Ingrid de Kok’s poetry has received rests in no small measure on her ability to write iconic poems that have stood in for (and up for) South Africa’s conscience in our most troubled hours, from 1988 to the present. For nearly forty years, we’ve relied on her to track our dreadful national alphabet from apartheid and Aids to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and xenophobia. Poems like ‘Our Sharpeville’, ‘Transfer’, ‘The archbishop chairs the first session’ and ‘Today I do not love my country’ spoke for us when we felt voiceless; helped us know how we felt when we were numbed by grief and shame.

But what if such a poet wants to speak of private grief and personal loss? In this, her seventh collection, sumptuously produced by Fourthwall Books, De Kok dares to do just that. In poems that reflect on the dying days of her husband (‘It’s ten past nine. / I don’t know what to do next. / I’ve washed the nebulizer mask / Waiting for your lung trenches’) and of her brother far away (‘At a northern boundary / Beyond him icy waste’), her signature style—understated, measured, patterned, economical—enhances the elegiac mood, the white space on the page creating visual signs of lacunae. To declare such poems ‘too personal’ is to misunderstand the way lyric poets interact with their readers: for the few moments it takes to read a lyric poem, you are the poet’s friend, their confidante and, not rarely, their double. 

In the past, De Kok has responded to the implied questions, ‘Who has had the right to mourn? And for whom?’ with poems that show how we all mourn; how we are all human. In this collection, she goes further, inviting her readers 

to feel grief in advance
even for the many dead
we don’t personally know
even for the yet undead
who will be dead later
and for our species itself
our falling irrevocable leaves.

This poem ‘Allowable grief’ provides a bridge to a sequence of the kind of poems De Kok does so well, poems that step around politics and ideology to tell real stories of a girl raped and made pregnant by a teacher, of babies found abandoned. Among these, ‘Mother country’ and ‘Found names’ will survive to remind the future what the acronym ‘GBV’ really meant in this country. 

Some ‘allowable grief’ must surely be reserved for South Africans’ sense of disillusionment thirty years on from liberation. The title of ‘Closed for reasons of joy’ is drawn from a sign placed on a Copenhagen store that lowered its shutters to celebrate liberation after World War II. The poem itself takes us back immediately to our own moment in history, 

when reason and hope leapt in the streets
when the past clambered over the barricade
and met the future, ululating.

There follows a detailed reflection on why 

a war zone after war ends
is not a sweet fresh spring.

De Kok hands out the blame evenly, with a succinctness that commissions of inquiry could learn a great deal from:

the enemy was not sorry enough
not grateful enough,
bullying from an invisible height.
The victors were euphoric
but unseasoned,
wielding promises, secrets,
fervent manifestoes,
and jockeying for position
at settlement’s high table.     

At the end of the poem, the only comfort is that we 

Still yearn to read that sign,
‘Closed for Reasons of Joy’
say on a corrugated spaza store
where we imagine its tall owner,
migrant from the imploded north
at last embraced by neighbours,
as we try to sing freedom once more
though wary now, only half-willing
to pay its volatile price.

To read a collection this accomplished is to wonder anew at how poems are made, where they come from. Its opening poem, ‘Scent’, gives an idea of how elusive and yet how thrilling the process is. For De Kok, the poem she hasn’t written is ‘a hungry word’, a ‘cunning survivor’, who ‘eats carrion, leftovers of lion kills, / whatever else he might find.’ A nascent poem, in fact, will eat anything, even ‘the garbage in my bin’. The poet feeds off whatever this ‘black-backed jackal’ forages: ‘he disgorges for me / as if I were his offspring, / animal remains’. She is not ungrateful:

Among them something herby,
Oddly aromatic but I can’t tell what.

If poems are indeed made of carrion, then their essence then their essence is death and rot. This brings us back to the title of the collection: Unleaving. It’s rare for a single-word title to carry such weight. In the poem ‘Spring and Fall’, Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the word ‘unleaving’ to represent human mortality. In weeping for the falling leaves, the child in the poem, Margaret, is in effect weeping for ‘the blight man was born for’. We are always dying, even when we’re young, hence the word is framed in a perpetual present continuous. Yet, faithful to the precepts of lyric poetry, both Hopkins and De Kok hold the door open for ambiguity—and therefore hope—to enter. ‘Unleaving’ means not only ‘shedding, dying’ but ‘lingering, never leaving’.

And how will we spend the time, in this lingering period between the deaths of those we loved, who died before us, and our own death? Playing, is the delightful answer:

Playing

Every morning I get up
and play my violin.
I know you know
I don’t have a violin
but I play it.

I watch
a silhouette
on the path
beckon another
illumination or tracing.

Everything hums
not only fridges,
children, bees,
women thinking of other things
as they work.

Watch, draw, sing,
play the violin.

• Finuala Dowling was born in Cape Town, a city she has recorded in both her fiction and her poetry. She has taught English at the University of South Africa and the University of Cape Town as well as other institutions, but now works as a freelance writer and creative writing teacher. Her five collections of poetry include Pretend you Don’t Know Me, a new and selected volume that brings together many of her most popular poems. Her sixth novel, The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers, was published in 2022.