Elsewhere: (Salt Modern Poets)

Presenting work that John Mateer has previously published in South Africa, Australia, Indonesia and Japan, Elsewhere is an introduction to a poet whose work has been steadily receiving international attention over the past decade. "Elsewhere" is divided into three sections: "Azania", "Medan and Zipangu" and "Americas". The poems of "Azania" describe the poet's memories of South Africa and his impressions when he has revisited the land of his birth, encountering animals, ghosts, Zulu and Maori poets, goldminers, gambling 'madams' and the urban ruins left in the wake of immigration. "Medan and Zipangu" contain work written and published in Sumatra and Japan. More metaphysical than the South African poems, these poems capture the spiritual turmoil of one who finds in the act of encounter the means of undoing the psychic violence of the past. Sensual and detailed, they are steps towards the healing of a traumatized psyche, the rebirth of a wandering ghost. The section concluding the book, "Americas", reframes Mateer's world through reference to those other New Worlds that are actually Old Worlds: the United States and Mexico.More ironic than any of his other work, these poems are pointed and political -- one about Ground Zero, another about a Slovene poet who, with the poet, seeks out a shrine dedicated to Saint Death -- and some with a deft sense of humour and surprisingly sexiness. "Elsewhere" is as much a personal vision of today's world, its excitements and plentitude, as it is a moral accounting of the history of the past five hundred years of Western colonization. John Mateer is a lyric poet for our global age.

Table of Contents:
Azania (Echo) Darkness My Mother’s Memory For The Mothers Remembering Seeris Johannesburg Silence Unbeliever Karoo Night: A Childhood Memory An African City The Alchemist Valkenburg Dark Horse Mountain Ascending Devil’s Peak Love Letter Lullaby The Guide The Elephant Graveyard Video Messages Thornbush Makwerekwere My Europe Uit Mantra A Streetkid “My Name Is Also John” Ethekweni In The Valley Of A Thousand Hills Going Home On The Bus From Pretoria To Kwandebele, 3 January 1984 An Empty Flat On The Mines Artefacts Found On The Highveld Two Kinds Of Silence Monte Casino Medan & Zipangu Mister! Mister! Mister! Two Images Looking At A Book That Voice Be Careful Amok No Woman... Translated Man The Monkey-Seller’s Stall The Rock This Path Takbiran Rain The Ancient Capital Of Images Dead Leaves Of Tokyo Industry: Two Kinds The Cockatoo A Portrait Of The Future Osore-Zan The Ancient Capital Of Images Autumn Is Everywhere Saigyo’s Cherry Tree On Seeing The Golden Pavilion Under The Temple The Deepest North Contemplating A Migrane Americas Empire Empire Two Faces Of A New World First Person The College Girl As Cypher The Dream Composition Of Unease Appointment With An Exile The Salutation We Heard Up In Harlem That I Might Be Mexican... The Virgin Of Guadalupe Condessa That I Might Be Mexican... Casa De Los Azulejos Invitation To A Slovenian Poet Das Kapital Ambrose On Two Paintings By Anonymous Ruins Words In The Mouth Of A Holy Ghost

About the Author :
John Mateer was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published five books of poems, several chapbooks and a prose travelogue about Indonesia. It has been his practice to publish outside the usual circulation of English-language literature, often having the initial publication of his work issued by small publishers in Johannesburg, Kyoto, Fremantle or Sumatra. He travels frequently to read his work, and has been invited to the 62nd World Congress of PEN, Poetry Africa 2001, Portugal’s International Meeting of Poets, the Festival of Poetry and Wine in Slovenia and the Chicago Humanities Festival. In 2005 he was an honorary fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program. He currently lives in Perth, Australia.

Review :
No one writes like John Mateer ... And no one combines observation and metaphysics in quite the way he does. Mateer's manner and the complex resonances of his work reminded me a little of the prose of his compatriot, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee. The poems are inquisitorial, ethically preoccupied and sometimes powerfully intense.