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KIN

Selected poems, song lyrics and prose sketches

by Barbara Fairhead

A generous portrait of an artist at the height of her powers of perception. In these poems, sketches and song lyrics, crafted over a lifetime, we come to share in the adventure of stepping out of what Grenfell Fairhead calls the "house of orthodoxy." What binds these pieces together is her exuberance, and the sense that we are always at the beginning. Again and again, one feels a sense of things just beyond the range of the senses, waiting for us to catch up with them. In each landscape she describes, one feels her sensibility in sympathy with it, finding a place in it. As she remembers and argues with herself, mourns and celebrates, we find ourselves accompanying her on this voyage of discovery with our own full attention.

ISBN 9781928433453 | 340 pages | 191 x 140mm | 2022 | Hands-On Books, South Africa | Paperback

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eBook ISBN: 9781991240194

Reviews

"Poems imbued with a deep-seated reverence for the natural world; poems charting journeys through longing and grief. There is much that moves, consoles and surprises me within the generous tapestry of Kin. The several haiku included in the book - often in conversation with other striking, longer poems or passages - are especially arresting in their distilled clarity and precision. Thematically rich and varied, deeply lyrical and finely crafted, KIN reveals Fairhead as a remarkably versatile and fearless writer. Probing, vital and reflective, her work is marked by an intense awareness of transience and death and thus, conversely, of beauty, and of what it means to be alive."

EDUARD BURLE

"KIN is a powerful record of one person's lifetime of family relationships, friends, lovers, pets, literary enthusiasms, and religious and philosophical cogitations. Barbara Fairhead's creative skills are apparent in a range of verse forms and in short passages which are more poetic than prosaic. Her finely wrought haiku signpost every nuance of the complex experiences to which the reader is introduced. Whether she is engaging with 'the watchful dead' or scanning waves as they 'run their long rolling whiteness across the bay,' Fairhead is a poet in every fibre. 'Heretic to the last,' she is engaged in 'living (her) dying'. Rather like one of her heroes, Karen (Out of Africa) Blixen, she has the independence and resourceful- ness to be herself."

GEOFFREY HARESNAPE

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