on a plane going back to South Africa. The book’s evocative cover, of a rain-streaked window looking onto a plane wing jutting out into the high clouds, reminds me of the strange and lovely moment, last time I flew home, when a choir stood up in the aisles just before the descent to Cape Town and sang acapella. Unable to travel since March last year, stuck in the United States where I teach for a living, I have turned to. This book transports me.
In the leap at the end, Van Schalkwyk’s poem startled me into pleasure – exactly what I needed in my pandemic-induced torpor, after months of hardly leaving my flat in the US. I emailed van Schalkwyk back to say how much I admired his writing, and began to read as many of his poems as I could find.had published his poem “Seawall” last winter, as the first wave of Covid-19 escalated.
The shadows of the statues disclose colonialism’s dirty laundry: I recognise this metaphor’s power. The last two lines, then, become the question of the poem’s title: Who, behind the drawn window-blinds, is refusing to look at the “laundry of shadows”? To his credit, the political questions that van Schalkwyk asks are subtle. This gives me, as the reader, more space to ask the questions for – and of – myself.
“Inner Workings” unfolds somewhere at the edges of Cape Town, at a “place of scrap, / of bits and parts,” where Lyle repairs watches and his friend Bob “would set some Holden panel van’s heart / to beating, with pliers, wrench, and oil.” The poem invites you to consider “the anatomy of clocks, their inner workings, / the gears that made them tick” that the speaker’s grandfather Lyle studies like “some high priest of time”.
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