Description
song of time
time is the skin of space
covers the body of thought
allows existence to breathe
love to know itself
it is timelessness
reflected in its own mirror
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There are very few book-length sequences of poems and it excites me to encounter this form in the work of a well-known South African poet. To sustain a cycle of poems is to begin to dismantle the barriers between a novel or short story and poetry. In book of songs Shabbir Banoobhai takes a position that requires daring combined with humility – there is no rhetoric, no propaganda, but also no slinking away, no hiding in the suburbs of language, no shrinking from an encounter with mystery. A meditative cycle like this one reminds us of our common thirst for love and meaning.
(Joan Metelerkamp – well-known poet and academic, University of Kwa Zulu-Natal, Durban)
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