Book description
In The Canary's Songbook Karen Press explores the inescapable
shaping power of personal and public histories in individual lives and
political processes. The theme has deep roots in Press's native South
Africa. The desire to find ancestors who can be invoked as sources of
wisdom, or validations of unwisdom, is a central preoccupation of the
poems, given force by Press's understanding of South Africa's
continuing, painful dialogue with its own past. The Canary's Songbook
affirms how universal such themes are, placing Africa on its own terms
within a global culture whose attractions and corruptions touch all,
and in which individuals struggle to make whole lives from the
fragments they inherit.
'It is largely a poetry of whispers, of hints, of indirect statement,
yet with cables as strong as steel for its backbone.' - South African
Sunday Independent Born in Cape Town, Karen Press has worked as a
teacher of mathematics and English, and with a range of independent
projects developing models of progressive education. She has published
seven collections of poetry and has written textbooks and other
education materials in the fields of mathematics, science, economics and
English, as well as children's stories, a film script and stories for
newly literate adults. In 1987 she co-founded the publishing collective
Buchu Books. She now works as a freelance editor and writer, and is an
associate of the national advice and information support service for
South African writers, The Writers' Network, which she helped to
establish.
