Award
winning local poet, Brian Walter, will be presenting a talk and
reading from his published collection of poems titledBaakens at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan
Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Central, PE on 17 June 2015. Guests are welcome to
arrive between 17:30 and 18:00. Refreshments
will be available.
Brian
Walter uses the valley as a focus of a poetic meditation, wandering into the
realms of the past, memory, racial divides, forgiveness and the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. Walter’s
early life and childhood experiences were intimately connected with a small
portion of the valley which he explored with school friends, and discovered
both the natural world and the people who lived across the river, in Fairview.
Like
South End, the non-white communities of Fairview were forcibly removed from
their land during Apartheid and in his poetry Brian reflects on how the valley was
both a link and divide between people living on either side of the river. Time
has, in his words, "crossed” him to that community, with his marriage into "our
own Pillay” family of old South Enders.
Copies
of Brian’s poetry collection will be on sale at the NMM Art Museum. The books
cost R 70 each.
The poetry
reading coincides with the NMM Art Museum exhibition Celebrating the Baakens Valley which is currently on at the Art
Museum and ends 18 July 2015.
For more
information or to RSVP, please telephone the Art Museum on 041 506 2000 or
email us at artmuseum@mandelametro.gov.za.
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