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As the epigraph to the collection ("by no other way") suggests, the
individual poems in Necessity emerge and take their particular form as
if by compulsion, out of a need to articulate such basic delights as the love
of language itself, as well as such familiar yet unfamiliar "ways" of feeling
as surprise, grief, despair, love, hope. So too, the poems make and record an
unavoidable but potentially self-clarifying quest in the face of injustice,
atrocity, beauty. Moving literally across large distances from Southern Africa
across North America, from mountains and deserts to rivers and oceans, the
poems also carve out a Pilgrim's Progress at the turn of the millennium.
What compels us? Why must things "turn out" one way and not another? Is there
a "necessary" set of laws that govern either the natural or human worlds? How
compatible are individual and social or political necessities? How do we even
apprehend, intuit, submit to, or defy the sense of inward or outward necessity?
What do we do with competing, seemingly unavoidable ruling forces—beauty
and injustice, love and aggression, order and energy, form and the resistance
to form, language and silence? If freedom is a necessity, is it freedom? Do
what degree is poetry itself (with its own inner laws and contradictions, its
own counter-turns of line and figure, thought and mood, artifice and passion)
one of the most traditional and continuously self-renewing arts of revealing
and addressing the matter and the force of "Necessity"—a
translation of the term anciently given to the goddess Ananke, whose union
with Zeus gave birth to one of the civilized world's first personifications of
Justice? If Justice is one of the daughters of Necessity, so, too, are
Invention and Virtue. Perhaps poetry is one of the few sites where these
siblings may continue to encounter one another with some consequence.
The book begins with two instigations: a nightmare of a raven trapped in a
clock, and a haunted encounter with a carved African head. Born and raised in
South Africa during the apartheid years, I absorbed overwhelming elements of
natural magnificence and of moral and historical catastrophe—an explosive
and expulsive force that set in motion an unending journey, moment by moment.
Ranging formally between long and short lines, direct image and indirect
reflection, the poems in Necessity seek to travel from memory toward
the as-yet-unimagined realm in which Justice, however remote, however blinded,
may be addressed with new force if not with a measure of grace, aesthetic or
otherwise.
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