Introduction to Groundwork I also want to wish you a very warm welcome to the Book Lounge tonight, on this wonderful

occasion, of the eagerly anticipated and patiently-awaited launch of Rustum Kozains second volume of poetry, very aptly, mouth-fillingly, titled Groundwork. I have been asked to say some words by way of introduction, and feel deeply privileged to do so. I dont want to take up too much of your time, but I do want to indicate briefly why I think this is such an important and joyous occasion, and what some of the things I think it might mean. I should begin with a personal admission of failure. When Rustums first collection, This Carting Life, was published, in 2005 or 2006, I was asked by a venerable Cape Town poetryjournal to write a review of the book. With a kind of barely-postgraduate over-eagerness I agreed to do that, and failed, found I couldnt wasnt able to write it. Because what I encountered in that book was a richness, a palette of moods and shadings of feeling, a sensuous, rhythmically unfolding texture and an entirely familiar but integral, entirely distinctive voice and more than that, the grain of a voice, as Barthes said, the materiality of the body speaking itself. I found that the glib instruments with which my academic training had provided me could gain no traction on this verse: the word that gathers weight in the rhythm of a line, or resonance in the extension of a thought, those reassuring surfaces of the everyday and aspects of Cape Town surroundings, that of a sudden gave way to enactments of an aching, persisting grief the absent lover, father, the selves of other times or to delirious visions of geopolitical reach. I found that this text could not simply be processed, as we do in the University chickens go in, pies come out. One had to learn be taught to listen, and to see. Entirely unhindered by my lapsed review, This Carting Life achieved the recognition that was at least its merited due, and as a volume was awarded both of South Africas supreme prizes for poetry, the Ingrid Jonker and the Olive Schreiner-prize, while individual poems were recognised with the Thomas Pringle-award an unprecedented and as yet unequalled feat for a South African author and book. On those counts alone, This Carting Life stands amongst the most acclaimed single volumes of poetry in South African literary history and, unsurprisingly, the most fulsome, attentive engagements with the book came from fellow poets. The success and critical stature of This Carting Life is certainly one reason why the appearance,
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today, of Rustums second volume, Groundwork, is so significant. But, I am equally sure that I am not the only person who has carried this book with them over these years, across turmoils and continents, who has imbibed its rhythms and colours and tones, learnt to squint at the world in its peculiar way, so in that manner lived This Carting Life. I am not the only one, I know, who has waited for this, with that unreasoning, unreasonable greed that readers share with children. And so, it is wonderful to encounter, or to re-encounter, Groundwork immediately recognisable, but uncannily different. Here, again, are the cadences of that well-known voice, etched in the memory, but smoother now with age that knows the weight of things and the agony of looking for trouble, and that rings out in poems like the resplendent This is the Sea (after a photograph by Victor Dlamini). Here again, the plenitude of the present moment, filled with absences made tangible and shot through with other elsewheres. We find acute memorations of erotic and familial intimacy those poems that are a way from loss/not nostalgic, not maudlin/but, like quatrains,/the windows onto loss/onto small sun-struck rooms/in winter suddenly still/when a parent leaves./Or in an instant empty/of a lover on their way to work these, in this collection, extended in the burnished, recovered grief-in-love and loving grief of the poems Groundwork, Groundwork X, or even Storytelling, which must together form the emotional heart-piece of the volume. And we are relieved to find the old idiosyncrasies intact, the epigraphs drawn from REM lyrics, the sexualised hommages to Charles Mingus or Jimi Hendrix, the fixation on the small, necessary, ritualised doings of the everyday speaking, watching, walking, to do nothing but smoke - twenty-six cigarettes to brew coffee, always coffee, another form of groundwork a sensory omnivorousness alive both to the urine-smell of the alley-way and the dank hospitalbed, and to the full, exotic luxuriousness of the kitchen cupboard cardamom, gemmer, anys, kaneel the savours of cookery. But the poet we encounter in Groundwork is not any longer the one we knew from This Carting Life. For all my affection for that preceding, first volume, fat with years and life, I would say this is a richer, more assured collection, a voice more agile, more effortlessly nuanced, surer of its effects, and more generous, and courageous, in its permitted emotions, unflinching. The persona of This Carting Life has itself become one of the many poetic resonances and inputs that go into the busy intellectual and citational traffic that Groundwork fosters. If Rustum sounds like nobody but Rustum, which is a rare achievement, as poets will
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tell you, then I suspect this is because his various poetic forebears are not elided in an anxiety of influence, but overtly acknowledged, hailed, teased, invited in. There is Derek Walcott, of course in a certain ambience of speech, in the yoking of colours green, yellow - to metaphor, in words like moiling and there is Yeats and fucking Eliot, as the poem Kingdom of Rats has it, the Black Mountain school, and many others, all hovering but engaged directly, as when, in This Carting Life, the poet sits on a park-bench, in Moscow, casually chatting to Osip Mandelstam, or as in the poem from Groundwork, in which Cesare Pavese is invited in, to take wonderfully anarchic occupation of the living-room. [reading When Pavese Visits] The word artist is linked, historically, etymologically, to the word artisan so the OED, a worker in a skilled trade, a craftsperson and poetry, as we know, and as W.H. Auden once declared in a knowing phrase, makes nothing happen. Which is also to say at least that it makes nothing happen; it stages and reclaims the passing instant, and reveals a fullness of meaning and activity where blindness, uncaring or authority assume merely an absence. In this way, Rustum is an artisan of the idle scene, and the consummate craftsman of the replete nothing. [reading from Winter Morning city balcony] A voice speaks, in the present moment, thereby taking it up. But it is itself merely a clearing, a space into which enter the conjured figures of the departed, relatives, loved ones and lovers, and with them the saturated places of bygone times and future hopes, a poetic heritage, long since not confined to a small island, or a small continent, in the north Atlantic, the noisesome bustle of the cityscape, with its outcasts and scavengers, glimpses of beauty and of the mundane, the gravity of an impersonal, and gruesomely capitalised History, and the stirrings of a hopeful struggle, for meaning and dignity, intuited, perhaps, half a world away all of these are held together in the grain of a voice, for as long as it speaks. I want to leave you with a poem, and extend to you the poets invitation, offered to W.B. Yeats as much as to the reader, and to go with me now to Benghazi. [reading The Free City of Benghazi] Ladies and gentlemen, we have a great poet with us here tonight let us put him to work.