I recently met the poet Frank Meintjies in the coastal village of Kleinmond, while visiting my sister, Marguerite. he had given her his recently published volume of poetry titled A place to night in, published by Botsotso. It bears the following inscription:
Through poetry we see farther,
and see in words. Enjoy
Frank
We have since spent marvellous times reading his 49 poems.
The backtext reads as follows:
‘In this poetry collection, Frank Meintjies navigates, to quote one of the poems, “the land, the land, the land” and engages with issues of dislocation, diverse landscapes, nature, attachments to place, and community.
‘As Prof David Medalie of Pretoria University observes, ‘’The experiences described in A place to night in, although intensely personal, are suffused with a wider history of displacement, uprootedness and the search for a home. Frank Meintjies has taken the shards of a fractured past and transformed them into beautifully wrought and linguistically deft poems.’’
‘Originating in Pietermaritzburg, Frank Meintjies has lived in the Western Cape and Gauteng. He has worked in the field of social development over many decades. Frank’s creative writing has been included in several journals or anthologies, including the Botsotso Literary Journal, Ons Klyntji and Absolute Africa. His poetry collections include Lockdown Poems, Unfettered Days, Connexions and My Rainbow. His work was repeatedly selected for inclusion in the Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology and his poems feature in the Grade 11 textbook, Vistas of Poems and the Grade 12 textbook, Landscapes of Poems. Frank is also featured in the book Twelve + One Joburg.’
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In the course of all of this, we also discovered another interesting Botsotso publication, titled TWELVE + ONE, featuring interviews with twelve poets (including Frank) by their fellow poet Mike Alfred.
Botsotso is a publishing collective with an interesting history. Its name is a reference to the tight jeans worn in Soweto in the 1950s, and means ‘strongly sewn’.
Read more about it here. It also has a Facebook page.
These two books and others can be ordered via botsotsopublishing@gmail.com
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Herewith one of Frank’s poems, chosen from A place to night in:
Cloud
A cloud a broken heart
wind a memory tinged by grief white butterflies
that swarm
on the praying worshipper
there’s a blue lining on white cloth
as raindrops dust the koppie
the rain and chant and feral freshness are
hymnal verses
in a vibration
carrying through time
the ochre and red bird
is a glow and a flicker
amid the branches
the soft soft cloud;
day turns to dusk
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FEATURED IMAGE: Frank Meintjies (left) with fellow poets Don Mattera and Diggie Mseme at Mattera’s Soweto home in February 2020. From Frank’s blog.