Sailor: Poems for my Father
Dan Wylie
Publisher: Dan Wylie
EAN number: 9780868104768
“I have sailed the length of the sliding world, and return, Looking for his footprints on the surfaces of waves. Even as I draw closer, with cautious oars, he fades. Where am I to look for him now?” – Dan Wylie, Sailor
Sailor: Poems for my Father is the fifth volume of poetry by academic, poet, historian and environmental crusader Dan Wylie. Drawing on motifs of sailing and Homer’s Odyssey, this intensely personal, startlingly honest volume explores the often fraught relationship between the poet and his late father, Jack Wylie. The poet casts his father as the intrepid Greek adventurer Odysseus, who famously took ten years to return home after the Trojan War. In this sense Wylie sees himself as Telemachus, the son of the great Odysseus, himself on a journey to gain knowledge about his lost father.
As with Wylie’s Persistence, which combines poems and images of small plants, weeds and grass growing in unexpected places, each poem in Sailor is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph, some sourced from the Wylie family’s archive. The inclusion of personal photographs, some capturing their subjects in candid domestic scenes, some imbuing an everyday inanimate object (such as a cane or a chest X-ray) with powerful emotional significance, adds a poignant visual element to the volume.
The theme of the son’s quest for the always seemingly inaccessible father is traced throughout the 33 poems. The volume negotiates the painful distance (as well as the awkwardly acknowledged moments of connection) between academic, artistic son and utilitarian father, and grapples with the trauma surrounding Jack Wylie’s rapid loss of eyesight, his illness, and, ultimately, his death.
As always, Wylie writes hauntingly beautiful poetry. Sailor is, however, his finest volume to date. I found the very personal, almost confessional nature of these offerings truly moving. Wylie writes sensitively and honestly about the death of a parent and captures the unique complexities of his relationship with his sometimes emotionally absent sailor father, while managing to avoid the trap of sentimentalism.
It is a grave indictment of the marginalised position poetry occupies in the South African publishing world that a volume as beautifully wrought as Sailor had to be self-published at great personal expense. Poetry, it seems, is simply not profitable. It is disheartening that such ruthless pandering to the economic gods continues to prevail over Wylie’s (and other local poets’) valuable contributions to the South African literary canon. Buying this volume (probably from the author himself at a launch or a literary conference) will make you feel as if you’re truly sticking it to the man.
Sailor follows on The Road Out (winner of the 1998 Ingrid Jonker and Olive Schreiner prizes), Original Forest, The Fourteen, Road Work and Persistence. Dan Wylie is also the author of Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka, Dead Leaves: Two years in the Rhodesian war, Myth of Iron: Shaka in history, Elephant and Shaka: A pocket biography.
Contact Dan Wylie at d.wylie@ru.ac.za to order a copy of Sailor.
Dan Wylie will launch and read from Sailor at The Book Lounge in Cape Town on Thursday 1 November, 6pm. All welcome. Snacks and wine will be available.