Description
About
From the Deep South website:
“Heart’s Hunger spans thirty years of Karen Press’s writing, covering love poems, historical-political poems, lyrics, satires and poems of place. Press’s precise and generous poems illuminate her close observation of people, and the places that embrace or refuse them. Her latest book is The Loving and Lovable City (May Not Yet Be Here): An Atlas of the Cape Peninsula.
For more than thirty years, Karen Press’s poetry has held a mirror up to South Africa. In it, we have seen our shame and our (rarer) heroism, recognised our locales, acknowledged our history, mourned our dead and laughed at our foibles. Heart’s Hunger, a judicious selection from eight collections, is a welcome publication from a quietly distinguished poet who has avoided the limelight. What shines out is not a personality or, God forbid, a brand, but exquisitely precise diction, compassionate observation and imaginative power. To read Heart’s Hunger is not just to know where we have come from, but to feel in a very visceral way what it has meant, what it does mean, to have been born here.”
– Finuala Dowling (2024)
About the Author
Karen Press lives in Cape Town, where she works as a freelance editor and writer. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in South Africa and abroad, and she has published twelve collections of poems. As a translator of Afrikaans poetry she has worked primarily on the poems of Antjie Krog, including Krog’s two recent collections, Synapse and Pillage.
