South African poet Manthipe Moila releases debut collection 'Rootbound'
The cover of Manthipe Moila's poetry book "Rootbound" / Courtesy of uHlanga
In the history of poetry, never before have there been so many talented and diverse poets across the globe who are existing and writing at one time. There are so many that they can remain undiscovered, joyously found or unfortunately forgotten in the digital landscape. Thankfully, in "Rootbound," the arresting poetry debut by South African poet Manthipe Moila, we behold a stunning collection. The poems compel a reader’s curiosity forward, line after line, page to page and cover to cover. This is a serious new voice that is cautiously youthful and wise beyond measure. From South Africa to South Korea, themes of home and escape and absence and presence buoy the poems with light and levity through a canopy of shadows.
Poets tend to have personal imagistic cosmologies like urban topography, mountains and seas, or clothes and tools; for Moila, the world of botany blossoms throughout her work. In the poem “7 ways of looking at the story of us,” we encounter this couplet:
“Once plucked from its stem,
the flower cannot return alive”
The couplet encapsulates an emotional and psychological terrain that converges into a physical manifestation. Image and topic marry into coherence. The jazz musician Charles Mingus said, “Making the complicated simple — awesomely simple — that's creativity." In poem after poem, throughout the collection, Moila accomplishes this with transparent language that paints devastating pictures that lacerate and suture the human heart, as in the poem, “Marking home”:
“Once the flames were gone,
soot clung onto the wall
like a beloved done wrong.”
South African poet Manthipe Moila / Courtesy of Rae Ann Bochanyin
Poet Etheridge Knight often commented, “When I look at a poet’s body of work, and I don’t see a poem about their mommy or their daddy, then I don’t trust them!” By that standard, Moila is a poet we can trust. Complex familial relationships breathe inside the poems that ultimately define this collection; in particular, poems about her father, as we see in two passages from “Playing with time”:
“I’ve found ways to keep my dead.
I’ve scented my life with him,
sandpapered mourning
into memory,
into meaning.”
And:
“Yesterday, he is not gone.
Tomorrow, he was somewhere
in that grove over there, or behind my eyes…
Today, he could love me,
and still leave.”
In a post-pandemic world, memory and loss have become common themes in our daily lives. Confirmation of experience seeks reinforcement. The best poets simultaneously usher readers into the poem as a participant while also inviting them to contemplate their own sagas. We experience this in the poem, “Faces”:
“On other days, everything has a face:
the clocks, the shoes, bodies of water.
I picture yours and my mind dissembles."
While the poet may move through countries domestic and foreign to us, the experiences and emotions the poet shares are universal. Moila’s poems are vulnerable, tender, intense, startling, yet also playful, as evidenced by this wonderful image from the poem “Helianthus”:
“The length of your laughter is a sunflower field.
Does this mean you are so beautiful
I cannot take you in all at once?”
Moila’s collection celebrates the beauty and mystery of incremental moments that pile into our spirits during everyday life as we try to cultivate something from nothing, solace from agony and hope from despair, as in the passage from “Creative endeavours for the sane”:
“Knitting loneliness out of the day.
Sewing seams onto my cracking
voice. Seems like you have left me
writing your face onto a skywashed
landscape. Mending cracks with
golden tributaries.”
Moila’s poems are amorphous and cumulative. They are presented in many shapes, layouts and configurations that ensnare the eye into their tactile geography on the white space of the page.
Moila has been published in a variety of leading literary journals throughout the world. She is also a finalist in the esteemed Charles Simic Poetry Contest. Encountering Moila’s collection, "Rootbound," is to truly find a diamond in the haystack.
A long career awaits her in the years to come. Her poems have depth and accessibility, which makes this a great collection for everyone from novices to seasoned connoisseurs. And more than anything else, as in the poem, “Adulting (a fairy tale),” the poet confirms to an audience of readers what they may be longing for during their struggles and the destinations for which their lifes are bound:
“And the light will touch you where
something more
than a tired life can, and will, bloom.”
Kenneth May is a member of the last Free People’s Poetry Workshop led by Etheridge Knight in Indianapolis
from 1989 to 1991. Since 1996, he has lived in Busan. He is the founder and creative
director of The Liquid Arts Network, an art collective dedicated to presenting art, supporting artists and
connecting communities since Nov. 11, 2000. Follow @liquidartsnetwork on Instagram for more information.