Onions
and Irises: Home Poems by
Marí Peté (Leopard Press 2024) will be launched on November 28, 2024, at the Durban
International Book Fair, Eduvos -- 1 Umhlanga Ridge Boulevard Lunar Row.
Peté’s latest collection of poems, is reviewed here by Jean-Philippe Wade.
“In the post-Covid era, the poet Marí Peté found herself living a hybrid life, spending much more time at home, allowing her to write these beautiful 41 poems by ‘dabbling and delighting in the domestic’. These are not poems about public socio-political events or assertions of identity; they are instead poems resolutely focused on the intimacies of the domestic sphere – poems of the suburbs.
“Cleaning and tidying the house are seen as necessary drudgery, but typically in these moving poems it is the wonder of quotidian objects, people and animals that is foregrounded. It is as if the forced increased time spent at home was not the occasion for boring suffering, but instead a permission to become gloriously aware of the significance of the mundane.
“The quantitative measurement of time is transfigured into the qualitative revelation of poetic meaningfulness that constantly reminds us that our humanity and cosmic understandings can be found in small things, in everyday experiences.
“The poems meditate on the ordinary, and it is precisely this imposed available time that allows poetic insights into table-cloths, onions, lemon trees, sardines, cats and millipedes. For example: New Friendship discovers ‘sweetness and sorrows’ from the gift of a lemon tree; Gecko lets the discovery of a gecko in her parents’ bedroom become a sober reflection on mortality; A Feather Dropped finds a feather which becomes a declaration of love for her partner. These are poems that celebrate not the general but the particular, not the abstract but the specifically concrete.
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(Marí Peté. Pic supplied)
“All of these (and others) are magically transformed by Marí Peté’s undeniable gift for language and poetic expression. She is able to express epic insights through an economy of language that is remarkable to observe.
“These are magnificently-crafted poems, expertly and subtly drawing on alliteration, assonance, internal rhymes, and aberrant spacings between words to create succinct slim poems that proclaim the process whereby commonplace things, animals, and people are transformed into the autonomous realm of the poetic insight into what it means to be fully human.
“These are gentle ecstasies - poems of great and delicate feelings - radiantly born in the ordinary experiences of domestic life, occurring in the three zones: the house, the garden and the wild forest beyond. Marí Peté’s receptive reflections on these spaces enables us to see them as porous, and all waiting to be transformed by the poetic vision.
“There are poems alert to the passing of time, of mortality and decay, all revealed in the unexciting cleansing of the home, and some others allow us to feel her distance from her daughter living in England.
“The physical book is a joy unto itself – beautifully designed on sturdy paper, with drawings and photographs and space to write our own poems. There is even a link to hear the poems read.
“This collection of poems is an ideal gift, a work of art of many journeys and quiet revelations. This is Marí Peté’s no less than ninth collection of poetry, and it is a demonstration of an artist at the height of her creative powers.”
Hardcopies are available at Ikes Books and Collectibles, 48A Florida Rd, Windermere, Berea, 4001
For more information contact maripetepoetry.com or mari.pete.enquiries@gmail.com