In The Canary's Songbook Karen Press explores the inescapable shaping power of personal and public histories in individual lives and political processes. The theme has deep roots in Press's native South Africa. The desire to find ancestors who can be invoked as sources of wisdom, or validations of unwisdom, is a central preoccupation of the poems, given force by Press's understanding of South Africa's continuing, painful dialogue with its own past. The Canary's Songbook affirms how universal such themes are, placing Africa on its own terms within a global culture whose attractions and corruptions touch all, and in which individuals struggle to make whole lives from the fragments they inherit.

Karen Press's first Carcanet collection, Home (2000), was acclaimed by the South African Sunday Independent for its 'finely wrought poems... by one of our finest poets'.

The sea roaring softly


Broken bits of the past
Knocking series
That house
When you're older you'll understand
Séance
Shrines
Treasure trail
Stones for my pockets
The poem each woman poet writes
Men wear the secret masks
Living children and dead children

In Jakob's house


Ox blood poisons the ground with longing
Visiting home
He can't explain
Outside and inside the temple
Corruption - a lexicon
Evolution: details
How her mother prepared her
Engineers of dreams


In the cradle of humankind
Every revolution begins in the streets
Tannie Lettie plays the guitar
Prometheus resigns from the Party
Only a good man
The personal assistant
Redistributing it
Preparing to govern
Oral tradition
Shopping
Stop child abuse
Wind parted the buildings
Three-stringed necklace
So very sick
Triptych
Flakes of the light falling


Book


It seems that if you write
This other place
In doorways
Between them
In my sleep
The hurting pillow
Cured


Walking songs for Africans abroad
Everywhere in the Duomo
Globalisation 1
Globalisation 2
Letters to the president
Distantly heard signals
Aching
Collioure, September 2001
Soft
Apprehension, north
A certain history
Wednesday morning in the Café Caprice
He is often mentioned in books
Reaching Siran
Translation rights
Ends that hang over the lake
The work the poets do
The canary's songbook