Ingrid de Kok is een van die plaaslike digters wat vanjaar op 9 en 10 Mei aan die Dansende Digtersfees by Spier gaan deelneem. Ongetwyfeld is sy een van ons vernaamste (Engelse) digters: “De Kok’s writing is widely anthologized, nationally and internationally, and has been translated into nine languages. She has read at major national and international festivals, from the Netherlands to Ireland, the UK and US; and has been awarded writing residencies by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Nirox Foundation Cradle of Humankind Artists’ Residency Programme. “
Haar werk is vantevore al met die Dalro Poetry Award vereer en in 2002 het sy die Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Literature met haar bundel Terrestrial Things ingepalm. Die Italiaanse verlaing van haar gedigte (deur Paola Splendaro) is met die Renzo Sertoli Salis-prys bekroon.
Oor De Kok se vyfde en mees onlangse bundel, Other Signs (2011: Kwela Books), het Mail & Guardian se resensent, Kyle Thomas, die volgende te sê gehad: “Ingrid de Kok’s fifth collection of poems, Other Signs, offers a profound engagement with what it means to be South African. De Kok has published poetry that decidedly complicates any neat diagnosis of the South African condition since the late 1970s and her sustained examination of the particularity of her past and present puts to shame the recent debate on whiteness and questions of ‘how to live in this strange place’.”
Bundels va Ingrid de Kok wat tydens die fees be4skikbaar sal wees, is:
Familiar Ground, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1988.
Transfer. Snailpress, Cape Town, 1997.
Terrestrial Things, Kwela/Snailpress, Cape Town, 2002.
Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems, Umuzi, 2006.
Other Signs, Kwela, Cape Town, 2011.
Hieronder volg ‘n gedig van Ingrid Jonker. Geniet dit.
*
Birds at Bellagio
Except for the undertaker-crows
sneering in sartorial black and gray
from elegant branches overhead,
the birds at Bellagio, small and large,
expect to die from gunshot wounds
on autumn afternoons.
So when Tony lifts his binoculars,
they shy from him as from a hunter,
into impenetrable green gloom,
their pewter throats sealing song
in the trussed cypresses that sightless guard
mass graveyards of Italian birds,
shot once for food, and then for sport
over three venal centuries, in peace and war.
© Ingrid de Kok