This is the eleventh in a series of long-form interviews by Patron Makhosazana Xaba to be hosted on The JRB, which focus on contemporary collections by Black women and non-binary poets. The others can be read here: Khadija Tracey Heeger, Thabile Makue, Maneo Refiloe Mohale, Katleho Kano Shoro, Sarah Lubala, vangile gantsho, danai mupotsa, Busisiwe Mahlangu, Tariro Ndoro and Saaleha Idrees Bamjee.

In opening up a space for wide-ranging, erudite and graceful conversations, Xaba aims to correct the misdeeds of the past by engaging black women and non-binary poets seriously on their ideas and on their work.

Two previous long-form interviews, with Mthunzikazi A Mbungwana on her isiXhosa volume Unam Wena, and with Athambile Masola on her debut collection Ilifa, were published in New Coin in 2022.

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Makhosazana Xaba (MX): Let’s begin with the poem titled ‘The Diagnosis’ in your debut collection Peach Country published by uHlanga in 2022.

I understand that your belly cracks beneath the weight of the air that
the blood pushes to your tail bone and that your eyes every now and
then see dark spots and you suspect that you have dizzy spells and you
think that the sitting feels like you have borrowed your grandmother’s
eighty-year-old body and kneeling brings no relief other than allowing
the air to settle heavily on your tail and ovaries and I remember from
our last meeting that when the headaches come your head becomes a
forgotten boiling egg and that you think the murmurs in your hands
indicate that you have a mild case of vertigo and that lying down eases
the air in your waist and you get an urge to pig out on junk food and
your mouth is dry as a burnt piece of steak and you guzzle water
down like an endless river and if I am to understand you correctly all
these symptoms occur at that time of the month?

A poem of 168 words in one stanza of 13 lines, 13 ‘ands’ and one punctuation mark: a question mark! Reading it in 2022 made me breathless and when I could breathe normally again, I laughed out loud, uncontrollably. What an exquisite example in writerly elegance, on menstruation nogal! Please share the thought processes that led you to write this—my beloved poem—in this way.

Nondwe Mpuma (NM): If I recall correctly, we were given a prose poem assignment for my MA. At that time I had been frustrated with my periods and how they had and still have my body off kilter, I was frustrated by doctors who could not provide a clear diagnosis and I was/am angry that the privilege of good medical healthcare does little to abate the pain inflicted on women’s bodies. It was also a response to the occasional trivialisation of women’s pain (especially black women who do not or seem to not have the privilege of good medical healthcare, in this regard, I am thinking about the predominantly terrible service that has always been rendered at Lubaleko Clinic—where you can spend an entire day to see a nurse or die if it is after hours and you need care) from period pains to childbirth and everything else in between. I wanted the poem to not come from the woman’s perspective but from medical personnel who is attempting to diagnose symptoms by clinically regurgitating the information that they are given by the patient. I suppose I wanted to imagine the mechanism towards figuring out a diagnosis for what is undiagnosable.

I wrote the poem as a free-write so it is only in retrospect that I am able to think about why my mind took me in this direction. I decided to leave it in this format to capture the breathlessness of exasperation felt by the patient and the discombobulation felt by the health practitioner. I think all poems live and die by having a rhythm and one of the challenges for poets who do not necessarily perform is how one creates that rhythm (sometimes understood as a beat or meter) on paper. One of the ways in which I have chosen to do that in this poem is through the lack of punctuation and the reoccurrence of ‘and’ in the poem. Not having punctuation but the single question mark at the end makes it sobering, making the question about ‘this time of the month’ potent for patient, health practitioner and (hopefully) the reader.

MX: When I was at boarding school as a teenager there were two classmates who ended up in the sick room almost every month when their period visited. This poem reminded me of them and many other women since then who experience menstrual pains in ways that make me wonder why a body would inflict so much violence on itself with such malicious frequency. Thank you for writing this poem. Please share memorable reader responses to this poem.

NM: Your response to ‘The Diagnosis’ has been the most memorable and I am honoured by this! When we were on a call and you told me how the poem moved your workshop participants, it had me believing that my contribution to literature is important and is doing way more than I imagined. In some ways, to have poetry published is to stand naked and let people judge and that continues to make me a little coy and shy so I still blush at any praise for any poem in the collection. Who would have thought that writing about period pains could be significant outside of the doctor’s office!

MX: In late 2025 I facilitated a workshop for creative writers, and I made the participants read this poem out loud: first, on their own, and then in front of everyone. When I asked them to reflect on their experience of reading the poem, the word ‘breathlessness’ came up frequently. Are you aware of who else uses this poem in their classes/workshops?

NM: I am not aware of anyone using this particular poem in the classroom or workshop. I know that Zubayar Charles, a poet, playwright and high school teacher, has used my poetry in his high school classes. He teaches English at a boys’ school and he once shared some feedback from the exercise he’d set on one of my poems; unfortunately, the WhatsApp gremlins got to my phone and deleted this particular exchange. Oh! How can I forget this! I also am aware that Koleka Putuma has used my work in a workshop that she’s once had. There might be someone I am forgetting and for that, I apologise, and there might be others who may have used the poem without my knowledge and in that case I hope all involved had fun.

MX: When I first held Peach Country I was drawn to the cover as I tried to decipher the entangled nature images. It was easy to spot the body in the water; my daughter spotted the peacock, and I googled the artist, Shakil Solanki. Were you involved in the choosing of this cover? If yes, what were your reasons for choosing this cover? If not, what was your response to your first sighting of it?

NM: I was involved in selecting the cover. When we had discussions about the cover of the collection, Nick asked me who my favourite young visual artists were at the time, Shakil Solanki was one of them. Shakil agreed to licence us an image for the cover (thank all that is holy!) and Nick was the one who’d suggested this particular artwork when he sent me the list of images that we could choose from.

Seeing Solanki’s work (I’d been following him for a while, but this time it was different), the blues, the blues, the blues did it for me! The name of the cover artwork is ‘Silly little fool, anything could happen’—isn’t it just delightful? The original artwork is an offset lithograph print and after looking through the portfolio which was interrogating ‘the trope of a secret garden’, it just seemed like the stars had aligned and I had to agree with Nick that this image was ‘the One’.

The artwork is delicate and carries the overall mood of the collection. The forest scenery evokes the country and the different gardens found in the poem. It is as though the figure is giving themselves over to something otherworldly and all of this just added to the poetry. I also like the typesetting on the cover which does not detract from the beauty of the artwork, one might even forget to read the title and my name.

MX: In the acknowledgments page you state that the original version of Peach Country was submitted for your MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). How would you summarise your experience of doing the MACW?

NM: I would describe the experience as necessary. I would not dare suggest that for people to be writers they need specific writing qualifications but the MACW experience gave me the tools to recognise what my writing is like in relation to other people’s writing. What I mean by this is that I learnt how my writing sounded, how it felt, its texture, its gravitas and unseriousness. I could sit in the class with four other brilliant poets and peers (shout out to Lisa, David, Lebo and Kobus) and still be able to receive feedback which was specifically for the way my writing moved and I could give feedback according to the different ways in which my peers’ writing moved. This is something that would have taken me a longer time to learn had I not taken a MACW.

The MACW expanded my knowledge and experience in poetry and prose; taught me how to edit myself and others. I also had time to discover poetry that I otherwise would not have encountered if it had not been for the programme. I would have attended fewer poetry events and probably would have kept my work to myself. There’s something to be said for being pushed outside your comfort zone and I think that is what the MACW did for all my writing.

MX: After you completed the MACW (cum laude) you became a staff member at UWC. The summary biography on the UWC website informs readers that one of your research interests is ‘writing about writing’. Please write a poem about writing about writing.

NM: Every time I try to write one I think back to Billy Collins’s ‘Introduction to Poetry’ and Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’ and I am paralysed.

MX: Okay you make me laugh but, I hear you. I have always loved the last two stanzas of that poem by Collins

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.

I had to search for Hughes’s poem. May I ask, what do you find ‘paralysing’ about it?

NM: I think it is because I love these two poems so much when I think about what it means to write. I actually teach Billy Collins’s ‘Introduction to Poetry’ to first years because hopefully after reading this poem, they do not ‘torture confessions’ or ‘beat’ any writing in their attempts to analyse literature. I think the poem suggests that there should be some pleasure in the process of reading and writing about writing, the experience certainly should not be excruciating.

Then ‘The Thought Fox’, oh! I read this poem in high school and a brilliant English teacher, Mr Herd, gave such thoughtful insights that I have carried them in my body since. This poem is so crystal clear about its metaphor for the experience of writing. Ultimately, writing is a person sitting and confronting the blank page, sometimes a thought comes and disappears and the page is left only with one sentence and sometimes the page is filled in no time. Hughes’s poem captures this experience of writing so well through the appearance of the fox (an extended metaphor of an idea or the imagination beginning to run) from this elusive place with ‘loneliness’ and the ‘blank page’ described as ‘this midnight’s forest’. The fox appears gradually for the writer to get to the place where the poem or idea is printed. When I read this poem, I think, ‘indeed, this is how poems end up on paper!’

It is the thought that there is no more that I need to say about how people should write that I find paralysing. Although I think that there are many other ways of approaching writing.

MX: The public record attests to the fact that Kobus Moolman has now edited two of my poetry collections—my second and my fourth—and I experienced his editorship as being the finest. He didn’t simply edit my work; he insisted that we discuss his editing style first. And then as he edited, he would comment on other poems, for instance, how the poem/s resonate with him. And his feedback was always constructive. How would you summarise—in very specific ways—your experience of being taught and supervised by Moolman and now being his colleague?

NM: I have been taught and am being supervised by Kobus so we have had a long journey together. In one of our earliest supervision meetings we outlined expectations of each other and one thing we agreed on was that he would not try to coddle me with regards to feedback. So, there has always been an almost brutal honesty between us when it comes to my work and students’ work (we have recently concluded a co-supervision). In my work, if I write something that is illegible, he will simply put a question mark or state that I need to explain myself or that it’s an incomplete phrase. He would tell me when I needed to let a poem go or when I was giving up too easily on a poem that had potential. Kobus has been encouraging, from directing me to opportunities to get my poems published to writing letters of support for funding as both supervisor and colleague. This is to say, the experience has been developmental, humbling and I hope that I have poured into his cup as much as he has poured into mine.

MX: Peach Country is in three sections numbered as 1, 2 and 3 with a total of 33 poems and each section contains eleven poems. What motivated this precise curation? If you were to title each section, what would these be?

NM: I often struggle with giving poems titles that I consider good. And that is probably why the sections are numbered. The curation was motivated by the progression that the collection needed to have in order to paint a cohesive image of the collection’s world. After an earlier submission of the collection, Nick sent me an email that said that the collection needed a narrative thread—a golden thread—which held the poems together. I think then that thread is the progression of the tension in each section, from pleasure to rapture.

I could have chosen to be basic and titled the sections 1 ‘Eden’, 2 ‘Eden II’, and 3 ‘Eden III’ or be a smidge more creative and have section 1 as ‘Seeding’ or ‘The Beginning’, section 2 as ‘Ripening’ or ‘Exodus’ (I like the sound of the word and I like the idea that the second section could have been interpreted as a kind of journeying) and section 3 as ‘Feasting’ or ‘Revelations’, ok so maybe this is inspired by the biblical take from section 2, I like the Psalms more, so maybe the final section could be Psalms.

So the options would be:

Eden, Eden II, Eden III
Seeding, Ripening, Feasting
The Beginning, Exodus, Psalm (I almost said, I hope there’s no copyright infringements but remembered that there are versions more than old enough to be fair use)

MX: Section 1 begins with ‘Eden’ and ends with ‘History of the year’. Let us begin with the whole of ‘Eden’

We begin with plein and pleasure,
let it be known.

There are no hills and mountains.
We won’t find bones here, not Adam’s,
not Eve’s.

Beloved, we are too close to waters.
Our totems fear the seas.

Between us
lust sits in burgundy.
We are easily movable in the work of the Lord.

There is so much going on in this short poem. Please translate it into your mother tongue.

NM: I have often thought about translating the collection but keep procrastinating. The translation needs notes but I’ll leave it to readers to decipher my choices. This is going to be hard but here you go:

Eden

Makwaziwe
Ukuba siqala ngomoya nenkanuko

Akukho nduli nantaba
Asinakufumana mathambo apha, nokuba ngaka Adam
noEva na.

Thandekile, sikufuphi namanzi.
Izihlobo ziyaloloyinka ulwandle

Phakathi kwethu,
Ukufunana kuhleli bomvu jwe okwegazi elibandayo
Sisuseka lula emsebenzini kaThixo.

MX: I so look forward to the mother tongue version of Peach Country! What needs to happen for this procrastination to end? For now, please translate the title Peach Country

NM: I wonder about my procrastination too, maybe the PhD needs to be completed.

Lizwe lePesika

MX: In ‘There is a goat for every occasion’ the word ‘goat’ appears five times in this one-stanza poem. Then there is a goat in every section. It shows up eight times in Section 1 and once each in Sections 2 and 3. When I first read this poem, I was reminded of a sentence that has stuck with me for ages: ‘The goat was the only domestic animal known’ (p. 79 of General History of Africa (Abridged edition) Volume 3 Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century (1988, UNESCO) edited by I. Hrbek). The quote is from chapter six, titled ‘The Bantu-speaking peoples and their expansion’. In a collection of 33 poems the goat shows up ten times as if to confirm that it was indeed domesticated many centuries ago. Are you familiar with the histories of domestication of animals?

NM: I am familiar with the domestication of goats, dogs, cows, cats, pigs and horses. As a second year student I was taught by Professor Wendy Woodward and she had a special interest in animal studies which spurred me on. I have read quite a bit about the history of the Eastern Cape and a little about the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal from missionary recordings to histories about Bantu-speaking people and goats and cows appear a lot there. My interests in the domestication of cats and dogs is because of the Discovery Channel as a teen which made me read up on both. My grandfather loved horses, we owned a few and every year we would watch the Durban July and when we eventually got DStv, he watched horse racing every so often and had knowledge about the breeds. So, I got curious and read up because how we kept our horses in the wild was drastically different to how horse racing horses are kept, there are even physiological differences. For a long time, we had pigs and they were of breeding grade, farmers would come and have their horses breed with ours and that also led me to educating myself on the domestication of the pig, its physical changes over time and I had observed how pigs that were not well kept changed from fur colour to changes in the facial muscles.

Now I really want to know about the domestication of the goat. My interest has been piqued. It’s strange that the goat was the only domesticated animal because goat meat is the rarest at butcheries and supermarkets. Most people that I have asked about this rarity say it is because the goat’s hair gets everywhere so it’s not as easy to handle as other four-legged animals that we eat.

MX: Wow, that’s such an interesting story. Thank you for sharing it.

The poem ‘From God’s stool in summer’ is a nod to Anne Carson. Please share some specifics on how Carson’s work resonates with you and what led you to write this poem.

NM: I was inspired by the poem ‘Powerless Structure Fig. 11 (Sanne)’ by Anne Carson from her anthology Float. The poem has a structure where the relationship between the signifier and the signified is unclear but striking. I wanted to experiment with structure in this way but creating closer relationships between the signifier and the signified.

I had to reread this poem to remember what it moves in me. It is the nostalgia of a really hot summer day, the joys punctuated by sadness and hope. It is a love poem but also not. I think I wrote this poem to remember its feeling and to describe it as such seems unnecessarily abstract but I hope the feeling is understood by those who have read the poem.

MX: ‘Tornadoes’ is the last but one poem of this first section. This line: We watch peacocks flare their feathers to their beloveds takes readers back to the cover and it takes me back to childhood. There was a farmer not far from whom we bought fresh milk. We watched boys milk the cows as we waited with our containers. This farmer also had peacocks that used to make me stand still in awe whenever they displayed their natural beauty. Please write a poem that has the word peacock/s in the title.

NM:

Thuli, the peacock calls

Leave him at the altar
You have seen farmhands dump sacks of potatoes
Has your fiancé flowered for you? Has he sung for you? Does he blind you?

The peacock is your sun,
Spreading his tail, blinding you, you have looked past him at the altar
Watching iridescent blue and green plumage.

The peacock sings to you,
calls for you.
Thuli, leave him at the altar.

MX: In ‘History of the year’ we read this stanza

We hail from peach country
In buckets and enamel bowls on the side of the road
Rotting peaches, worm-invaded peaches
In tight-lidded used mayonnaise bottles waiting for Christmas peaches
We are people at war against dry lips and grumbling tummies

This poem connects people to nature in such powerful ways that the two become inseparable and the last lines do this effectively as they congeal the workings of seasons, geography and ‘all things living’

We read the endings and beginnings in the stars
We know that the plough is nigh

Please share your process of writing this poem.

NM: This poem contains the most research grounding compared to most of the poems in the collection. I knew from the onset that I wanted to preserve how Xhosa people made sense of the passing of time. I am fascinated by etymologies and because I primarily work in English, I tend to geek over English words but in this poem, I wanted to honour the etymology of the year and its months in isiXhosa. It is sad and maddening how vernacular languages are taught in schools, I remember that in my Zulu and Xhosa classes, I could get away with writing ‘uJanuwari’ for instance and there’d be no expectation that I know that January is uMasingana (Zulu) or eyoMqungu (Xhosa) as this was almost taught in passing as a ‘for your information’. I don’t know if many people know that the Xhosa calendar was originally six months and each month was named after the progress of the planting of sorghum, mealies and pumpkins while eyeCanzibe was named after the second brightest star in the night sky (which was the sign for harvest time) and eyeSilimela was named after a Pleiades constellation signalling the beginning of winter. The additional months were given indigenous plants that were characteristic of the Cape region.

eyoMqungu (Tambuki grass)
eyoMdumba
eyoKwindla
uTshaz’ iimpuzi
eyeCanzibe
eyeSilimela
eyeKhala (aloes)
eyeThupha (buds)
eyoMsintsi (coast coral tree)
eyeDwarha (tall yellow daisies)
eyeNkanga (small yellow daisies)
eyoMnga (acacia thorn tree)

For reference I have included the months that do not appear in the poem and I should state that I took some liberties in my poem where eyoMqungu should have been replaced by eyeThupha to stay true to the logic and naming of the Xhosa calendar. The poem ends on the actual first month of the year. With the exception of eyeThupha all the months are named after a plant. I have always liked the Greeks and their gods and I play with some of that in the poem.

I grew up with peach trees and when summer approaches you’d find women selling peaches just outside of Kokstad and my grandmother would make peach preserves reusing bottles of mayonnaise. We grew up farming (especially mealies, pumpkins and beans towards the end of the year) so I am intimately familiar with the ploughing, sowing and harvesting which are the inspiration for this poem. In rural life, farming does not happen without a trust or belief in the will of nature and people’s hands, this is why the two are inseparable.

Thank you for this opportunity to provide a little bit of clarity and insight into my thinking about this poem as the title of the collection is derived from it.

MX: Section 2 begins with ‘Loved-one follow (Eden II)’ and ends with ‘Untitled’. In ‘Eden II’ you hold our attention through colours that nature presents as the seasons change. The speaker gives the loved one suggestions, using the words: ‘Enter’, ‘Walk slowly’, ‘Don’t rush’ and ‘Watch’; that begin the first four stanzas. The last line of the sixth and final stanza reads: The breeze is disobedient, and the leaves fleet away like dust. Since reading Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I can no longer read about dust in literature without being reminded of this impressive novel. What is the background story to ‘Eden II’?

NM: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust is now added to my list of books to read. I had written all three Eden poems as part of a separate series of poems, I think two of those were cut from the collection. I had written the poems working with the prompt of ‘garden’ which was a theme for the 2018 McGregor Poetry Festival. ‘Eden II’ is my version of a stereotypical nature poem from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ to William Blake’s odes to all four seasons and Keats’s ‘The Human Seasons’. There is something deadening about dust, perhaps it is because the phrase ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ is used at Christian funerals or the fact that dust is ephemeral and therefore always eliciting some form of nostalgia. Nostalgia is generative for me, or it was in the years that I was writing a number of these poems.

Another thing is that autumns ekhaya can get very brown from the grass turning gold to the soil, the trees browning and bare and the experience of small twisters feed into the last line now that I think about it.

MX: The list poem ‘Morning is the time we count the dead’ is after Takako Arai and it lists ways of care (my summary). Thanks for this introduction, I will look out for her poetry. Why is this poem after Arai?

NM: The poem is after Arai because the title is borrowed from the first line and refrain of Arai’s ‘Give Us Morning’. Arai’s poem stayed with me after the first time I came across it in 2017, I think my poem functions as a response or as an extension so it is only ethical and appropriate that the poem is after Arai. I remembered that after reading Arai’s ‘Give Us Morning’ there are many who never see morning and we mourn them instead. I think I wrote this poem thinking about my two cousins who I dedicate this collection to. They died too young, they were both so vibrant and alive and I have had many mornings of mourning them. The idea that they are counted among the dead in whatever tally the universe keeps. The speaker in Arai’s poem says ‘the morning is still not enough / we still cannot count them all’ and concludes the poem in these three lines:

Give them to morning
Give us morning
The time we count the corpses

This poem arrested me and I needed to respond to it in some way and ‘Morning is the time we count the dead’ is that response.

MX: Also in this section is your poem ‘Home’ that won you the 2017 Patricia Schonstein Poetry in McGregor Award, long before Peach Country found a home on my bookshelves. How would you summarise this experience?

NM: I was shocked and the experience was humbling and affirming. I was surprised that the poem resonated with the selection committee and I was shocked that there had even been a competition wherein my poetry was up for selection. So, shocked, humbled and affirmed would be how I summarise that experience.

MX: When I first read Peach Country I skipped ‘Untitled’ because over the years I have learned not to like untitled poems. In preparation for this interview, I decided to read it and, for the first time in this poem titled ‘Untitled’, the title made sense. The fact that it is the only poem in this whole collection that is ‘Untitled’ solidified what I want to call the ‘given appropriateness’ of this non-title. The word ‘Here’ opens the eleven lines of these four stanzas that also read like a list poem. You have convinced me I need to leave room for expertly chosen uses of ‘Untitled’. Please share your logic for using ‘Untitled’ so I can rid myself of my suspicion.

NM: I usually use ‘Untitled’ as a placeholder when I have not settled on an appropriate title for a poem. In the case of the poem ‘Untitled’, I could not find an appropriate title, I don’t think there is one. I had two choices, the first was to leave the poem without a title but the problem with that is it suggests that the first line of the poem can be appropriated as a title. ‘Untitled’ on the other hand, gives the poem a title while stating that the poem does not have one. The use of ‘here’ also made it difficult for me to give this poem a title, ‘here’ suggests a specificity that does not exist in the poem and a title would have worked to concretise the ‘here’.

The prefix of un- in the title contrasts so well with here. One indicating a reverse action the other insisting on positioning the action in the poem. The poem being untitled leaves open how each reader perceives the ‘here’ or ‘here(s)’ of the poem.

MX: The third poem in Section 3 titled ‘At the end’ ends in this four-line stanza:

In this moment we abandon fibre optics and satellites.
Our mouths do what they do best.
Words dissipate with time; we have made them expensive.
Like air they become thin, only to reverberate throughout the cosmos.

I like how the format of the poem intensifies its message and essence, including the meanderings, until this settling at the end, with the accompanying reverberation. It’s such an accomplished poem at so many levels and it leads me to ask, please summarise your poetry journey before you did the MACW.

NM: Thank you. I think this poem is so satisfyingly sensual. My affection grew for poetry (specifically, I have always been more of a reader than a writer) in primary school when our English teacher gave us an exercise to find a poem independently which we would then recite in class for marks. I remember that poem partially, it had some of the following lines:

…My body is mine
And mine alone
It’s not anyone else
Its my home
And I will be living in it for ninety three years
So I might as well accept my big ears
Nobody is perfect,
Nobody is a dream…

These are just some of the fragments that I can recall. I then wrote my first poem after reading the YA book How to Salsa in a Sari and came across Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ and wrote my first sonnet. This was in 2008. I still have that sonnet and it sucked. I continued writing occasionally for myself until I started my creative writing elective in third year where other people got to hear and read my poetry.

MX: Then there is the humour-filled ‘A Courting’ where a cat, a mouse, a pigeon, sheep, a lamb, chickens and cows are at home as characters in this courting story/journey which ends with the line: At night-time I want you to see the fullness of the moon and the dust of matter in the sky, which reminded me of another poet’s ending lines. I do not memorise even my own poems but there are other poets’ lines and stanzas that will not leave my brain. Please share three lines and/or stanzas, by other poets that have stayed with you without trying.

NM: Elizabeth Browning, I was an impressionable youth with romantic ideas.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

Shakespeare: ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day / thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / and summer’s lease hath all too short a date’

‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of dead land’—T.S. Eliot.

This is my list, though if you ask me another time the answer may be different.

MX: When I searched for scholarly articles on Peach Country I found none. I only found the review by Niyi Akingbe and an interesting interview Robin Tyler conducted with you and Athambile Masola on ‘Theory-making in African Languages’. What did I miss, might you be aware of articles I have missed?

NM: I don’t think that you are missing any articles. It tends to be this way for most poetry collections in the country. We do need a reinvigorated scholarship on South African poetry in general.

MX: During your 2022 reading at The Red Wheelbarrow soon after the book came out, you mentioned the ‘weird’ and ‘awkward’ feelings you had when people recognised you in public spaces and told you they had read the book. How does it feel, three years later? How would you summarise your journey of having become recognisable in public spaces and seen because of Peach Country?

NM: It still feels awkward and a little bit weird three years later. I don’t know if I think of myself as a recognisable person because of my book so I’m still unsure of how to act in instances where I am recognised. It is still a learning curve for me.

MX: In Peach Country animals (domestic and wild), birds, insects, reptiles are at home. Listed here are the ones I spotted, presented in alphabetical order of the singular version (some appear in the plural version in the poems), and the ones that appear three times and more are underlined: ant, bee, buck, cat, cattle, chicken, cow, crow, dog, donkey, fowl, goat, heron, horse, lamb, leopard, monkey, moth, mouse, inkanyamba, peacock, pigeon, rabbit, serpent, sheep, snake, spider! This shows the ordinariness of animals as the natural aspect of rural lives. Do you have a special connection with any of these animals, bar the goat that makes you glow? If yes, which one/s and why?

NM: As unolali I grew up surrounded by animals (domestic) with fantastical stories about wild animals. I have a special connection with one particular chicken that absolutely hated me, it was a dog and it terrorised me for almost an entire year (I think I was in grade 2/3). Once it did not just peck the crown of my head, it bit and held on as I was kneeling washing a chamber outside until my grandfather or grandmother ran outside to me screaming bloody murder. In retrospect, I have funny stories of that time so I am always curious about the internal world of animals.

I grew up with so many domestic animals in the yard that I now only love them from afar but while I am in Cape Town I miss the sound of the rooster in the morning and sometimes the tending to goats and sheep, that was such a gentle life. I also think that growing up elalini forces you to have an appreciation for animals that you otherwise would not have had. For instance, my grandfather always told me about how our family totem is umhlwazi (snake), our neighbours are related to uMajola (snake), my aunts are ooMaradebe therefore have the crab and you learn that when bees have come then your ancestors have visited. These examples are of animals that are then meant to garner respect immediately. Some of these things have stayed in my psyche and maybe this is my connection with animals.

MX: Peach Country immerses the reader in rural South Africa. As someone who grew up in a rural area and was surrounded by similar geographies, reading on Lubaleko, emaXesibeni AKA Peach Country (I assume) was highly relatable and nostalgic. I was back to my childhood reliving it all, including the spectacular peacock displays that I used to marvel at while I found them perplexing and a joy to watch. Please share memorable rural-relatability feedback you have received since the book came out.

NM: There is a reader that I met at Franschhoek Festival who had come with her daughter. After my session, she came up to me and told me that the only reason she came was to see me and to tell me that the book reminded her of her childhood and her daughter also read it and was able to better imagine some of her mother’s stories. That moved me in ways that I cannot adequately express.

MX: You are one of the organisers of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Society. What is the biggest lesson you have learned from this role?

NM: I learned that it takes something from you to try to keep something that grows beyond your imagination. TRW grew so much from a group of 5 poets who wanted to expand the places that were available for poetry and it became something that required more from all of us who have kept that space going. I learned how to hold a room, how to hold different people’s contributions to the space. I have never been asked this question and it is hard to answer it because then I did not feel the growth happening until I was already overwhelmed. I think a great number of brilliant people are still keeping TRW going as I stepped back to write.

MX: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. Let us end with a poem, one where you respond to the question: What is poetry to Nondwe Mpuma?

NM:

What is poetry?

Poetry is isicamba samathambo.
In the ancestral bag,
the small bark says
we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
The cap of the coke bottle says we all march to a future.
The leaf says fragile things may rot but they continue on
no longer in green but browned, tea is from browned leaves.
There is bone covered by flesh then soul and finally story.

Thank you for this opportunity to reflect on Peach Country, I have had a blast.

• Makhosazana Xaba is a Patron. Xaba is an author, translator, and poet. She has written four poetry collections, these hands, Tongues of their Mothers, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water and The Art of Waiting for Tales. Her debut short story collection, Running and other stories, was a joint winner of the 2014 South African Literary Awards and Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Xaba has edited several books, including Our Word, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2015, Queer Africa: Selected Stories (with Karen Martin) and Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home (with Athambile Masola). Her latest book is Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, an isiZulu translation of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

Photo courtesy the author/Open Book Festival