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Farm, fun and life tools all in one ‒ a fantastical world that belongs to Ellie, Johnny, Nala and Tuma ‒ the Gift Gang team!
Heap of Stones is a selection of forty poems from two decades of AE Ballakisten’s poetry, many written while in his twenties. The book opens with a pledge by the poet; that his poetry will always reflect his “true word”. Indeed, the poems have a bold honesty; they are a powerful reflection of the human experience and range in emotions from anger and heartbreak to hope and contentment.
A lot can happen when a comfortable American lifestyle is purposely disrupted. The author was a middle-aged, conservative, Christian, Midwestern mom who embarked on an unexpected journey when she questioned her faith, left suburbia and moved across the world in search of a transformative spirituality.
Samuel John Frederick Platt was born two months prematurely and rushed into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It soon became apparent that the new-born had a rare disease, confounding specialists and sending his parents, Melissa and Fred Platt, on an emotional rollercoaster as his condition was misdiagnosed several times.
His distraught parents stood by Sam’s side and advocated for his needs, while feeling ignored by some of the health care professionals assigned to Sam’s care. After more than a year in a private hospital in Johannesburg, Sam’s parents managed to get a second opinion and secured a transfer to a hospital in Cape Town.
Many thousands of South African children are brought up by their grandmothers. This is one of the many manifestations of an unstable and distraught society, where the mother to child bond is too often broken, causing pain and a deep-seated sense of loss to both parties. Each Gogo-raised child’s story is different, but the general theme is the same: it deals with abandonment, with only qualified acceptance, but most of all with the simple absence of a real mother presence. The title of Vanessa Neo Mathope’s book – Orphaned, with Living Parents – tells it all. A monstrous imbalance has occurred, and the consequences run deep.
AE Ballakisten returns with his new anthology of Poems, Talking to a Tree. His debut anthology Heap of Stones garnered plenty of critical praise and public appreciation and Talking to a Tree is already showing signs of following in that tradition.
Talking to a Tree asks the crucial question of mankind through the poems that make up its contents: “Is this really how we want to live?” In a range of voices and poems, the book surveys the state of humanity revealing the themes of conflict and decay. In his words we can clearly see the fear of the poet that we are rapidly eroding our humanity and threatening our already fragile world.
A soul that is afraid of dying has never learned to live … This is the precept by which Dick Mawson has lived his adventurous life. He was born in England during the Second World War. With his parents he crash landed into southern Africa where he grew up.
The world is ending. People, animals, plants – there is a universal dying-off of the planet. Rumours persist of a reprieve but none appears. Two dogs and their human companions bond, as they trace a vivid circuit in a region not dissimilar to Cape Town; they encounter the violence and decay as they travel, struggling to survive. It’s a tough passage through societies of degradation and unsettled by a war beyond the mountains that encircle them.
