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Full Description
Intimate Lightning is the first book-length study of a poet who, though still frequently anthologised, has fallen into some obscurity. Yet Sydney Clouts (1926-1981) was acknowledged by many during his lifetime as the strongest poet of his generation, albeit a difficult and elusive one. His Cape Town-inspired poetry fizzes with energy, an adventurous vivacity of image, a capacity for delight, an authentic humility, yet an authoritative sense of cerebral depth. Reading Clouts attentively is still both a poetic delight and a heady intellectual challenge.
This study is biographically-framed, but is centrally an appreciation of the poetry: "The work is the thing!" Clouts himself urged. The exploration is supported by interviews with family, friends and colleagues, but draws most importantly on archival sources: his letters, notebooks, and some 1700 pages of drafts that illuminate his methods. It unpacks his essential themes, follows up his wide and eclectic reading, explores his relation to the troubled politics of the apartheid era, and offers an explanation of the poetry's philosophical underpinnings. Intimate Lightning finally pays proper attention to a man who devoted himself unremittingly to poetry.
Contents
Preface: "The Work is the thing"
A note on referencing ?
Introduction: "Fragile resilient life"
PART ONE: LIFE AS WORK
1 . Beginnings
2 . Juvenilia
3 . Anxieties and influences
4 . "The Beginning"
5 . New soundings
6 . An impossibly difficult move
7 . Publishing One Life
8 . The "Hotknife" affair
9 . One Life, the critical reception
10 . A dangerous country
11 . "Grahamstown is like Paris!"
12 . "The Violent Arcadia"
13 . Pavements grey
14 . "Wat die Hart van Vol Is"
15 . Endings PART TWO: A NATURAL PLACE
16 . Part and particle
17 . The pebble outside
18 . . . . and Thomas Traherne
19 . Coastlines toughly disputing
20 . Mountainous weather
21 . Animal kingdoms
22 . Long and wandering forests
23 . Peripateia
24 . Darken us, lighten us
25 . Silence and song
PART THREE: VIOLENCE IN ARCADIA
26 . Violence in Arcadia
27 . Love's assonance
28 . Odd and strange characters
29 . Afar in the desert
30 . Bartholomeu Diaz and the advent of imperialism
31 . "Juan"
32 . The decline of the West
33 . "Intimate Lightning"
34 . To write like Mondrian
35 . "Residuum" PART FOUR: PHILOSOPHIES OF BEING
36 . To speak like Skelm!
37 . The dry political gaze
38 . Heraclitus' fire
39 . Jewish poet
40 . Colonial Romantic
41 . . . . or Modernist?
42 . Phenomenologist
43 . The self in the ecosystem
44 . Beyond metaphor
Epilogue: "Seahorn messiah"
