Ingrid Jonker: A Poet`s Life by Petrovna Metelerkamp

NEW Paperback

This edition Published: 2013

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She was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being. In the midst of despair, she celebrated hope. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life, President Nelson Mandela said of Ingrid Jonker in his inaugural address to Parliament on May 24, 1994. That was after he had read her poem The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga in full.

Often compared to Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf because of her suicide (she drowned in July 1965), sometimes to Marilyn Monroe over her tumultuous love life and sadness and used as an icon for political motivation or literary rebelliousness, Ingrid Jonker has become mythologised.

The fact is she was a truly South African poet and merits to be read in English as well.

In this attractively illustrated biography Petrovna Metelerkamp gives an expanded translation 10 years after publication of the Afrikaans version Beeld van n digterslewe. This edition contains new material and a different cover with a mesmerising photograph of Jonker with the sea and the poem Korreltjie Korreltjie sand in a faded background. As the author says herself in the foreword: Rather than interpret or play the role of censor, I decided to proffer all the material gathered objectively without comment. It is left to the reader to interpret the events and absorb the influences on Ingrid Jonkers life. Indeed.