“I stood on the white sand
under the hawking dark
and I was laughing,
or I sang my finished song for guitar and knife.”
From ‘I lit a fire,’ Loving the Dying
LEN VERWEY
About the Author
I’m a South African writer, born in Mozambique in 1973. I live in Cape Town, and before that Pretoria, and before that a childhood and youth mostly in the Netherlands and Germany.
I’ve published two full collections of poetry and a shorter chapbook before that, and poetry in journals such as New Contrast, Transnational Literature and London Magazine.
On the back of the new collection it says:
“…poems of uncertainty rather than certainty. The more overtly biographical ones end with as many questions as they start with, and there is often sympathy for the outsider or the marginalized voice….Verwey’s poems focus on the tension between escapism and reality, truth and delusion(for individuals and societies), and the need to face death if we are to care for the aged and learn to understand the process of dying.”
Collections
Loving the Dying, 2023
In our dazed perfect unflooded world
things went on as they may.
We were unwary. We did not notice
the people collecting on the roofs,
waving at the sky, later
the garden furniture floating by.
from ‘Wave’
“This is a brilliant, contemplative, passionate collection…A poetry of the afterwards, the collection reaches past ‘unconfronted shadows’ and ‘old acrimonies’ and ultimately toward love.”
– Gabeba Baderoon, author of A Hundred Silences and The History of Intimacy
In a Language that you know, 2017
We torched the maps
when we torched the crops.
We torched the crops
when we knew those back home
wouldn’t take us in again.
The maps meant nothing anyway.
from ‘Campaign’
“Such poems employ the periphery as an active, sometimes disquieting space from which to imagine . Such poems disarm me into sorrow, into hope.”
Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria and Kingdom Animalia
Otherwise Everything Goes On, 2014*
In the backyard tree you lived, a halfway bird
perched in shorts above the suburb’s barking dogs,
what boyish vow or test had you imposed now,
I wondered, thinking soon you’d tell,
but every year you spoke less to me or anyone
and walked in wider circles around my love.
from ‘My Mother Speaks’
There is, in Len Verwey’s Otherwise Everything On, a quiet and meditative quality that belies the cacophony of psychic and emotional noises he is tapping into as a writer. …Verwey’s tidy stanzas, his carefully selected diction, and his capacity to create a lyric gracefulness in his poetry are all indications of his necessary and urgent contribution to African poetry.
– Kwame Dawes
