Orphaned Latitudes

Gérard Rudolf

Gérard Rudolf is a writer, poet and actor. He was born in South Africa and grew up in the cultural car crash zones of Cape Town and Johannesburg. After setting fire to his life in Cape Town he headed for the UK where he started writing full time in order to orientate himself on the map. This is his first collection of poetic writings.

Two poems: 14th Avenue, Tshwane (née Pretoria?)  |  Last Days of the Comeback Kid  |  Reviews

14th Avenue, Tshwane (née Pretoria?)

Time takes the heart of every thing. It has nothing to do  with you or the place. There is just the overness of it.
Every thing is still there. Yet nothing is left.

It is the same house in the same yard in the same street.
It is the same window. It is the same stream.
Yet the water in it is different water. That is all.

So, you saunter down the unsame street, past the changed stream,
towards the house where the overness of every thing sits and waits
in patient chairs, on restless beds, inside a cold kitchen

with cupboards vacant as caves and a saltshaker filled with nothing
but thirst. In every photo they still pose: Stiff-backed-bug-eyed,
cramped inside collars and bodices, confined

to frames: Men's men, ashy women, offspring in sailor suits.
No names. Your blood is their blood. Their marrow inside your bones.
Box-Brownie-stares seem to expect a real birdie to fly at them

in that blinding blaze between the whip of a shutter and the flutter
of eyelids. Beyond the window: the garden of good and milk, the land of evil
and honey where days still break as they always have: blood-orange red

behind bulky trees, black branches bending under wet weight
of unplucked fruits, rot slowly eating at the roots.
Yes, that unsame house under unchanged stars where

the sash window is the guillotine in your childhood dreams, where
numberless versions of you have stood in many shoe sizes, where
time broke in and took your heart and replaced it.

Last Days of the Comeback Kid

During the last months, they said
the Comeback Kid stopped reading newspapers,
left them untouched and neatly folded
next to his easy chair like a pile of fresh table cloths.
They said, during the last weeks,
the Comeback Kid lost all interest in hunger and thirst,
ignored sustenance as if he was a holy man fasting for insight.
They said he lost all sense of place, time, space, that he became a drifter, a man adrift, flotsam.
During the last days, they said,
the Comeback Kid slept almost nothing, emerged at noon,
a retired boxer who'd had his fill of fights.
They said the Comeback Kid became a man of halves:
half asleep, half awake, half sad,
half interested, half there, half not.
By the last day, they said,
the Comeback Kid was made of wispy things:
skin rice-paper-thin, hair of cobwebs,
limbs brittle as drift wood, leaf-flat body, reed-thin voice.
Then, in his final hour, there were the last quivers,
breath the sound of a canned blizzard.

And during the last minutes, I imagine,
the Comeback Kid became his own shadow,
blue eyes black as squid's ink,
arms flung open like a skydiver frozen in free-fall,
a landscape gathering darkness at the end of a day.

---

"...So treat this as a mention, not a proper review. Last year several bloggers mentioned Gérard Rudolf's Orphaned Latitudes, from Red Squirrel Press. Well, now I've read it, and I can see what the fuss was about. I connected with it immediately, and it gripped me until I finished it this morning. Gérard is from South Africa, and many of the pieces?/poems related to his growing up in that country. What I know of it (apart from the botany and the geology) is mostly what I've learned from newsreels, but now I have a better understanding from the inside, of what it's like to experience life there. It's stunning. Go read!"

Colin Will, Sunny Dunny Blog

"This may be my favourite book this year. It abounds with feral energy - pulsed with passion for people, places and a lost landscape. The landscape is the township, the veld, the politically charged Africa of the 'great crocodile' PW Botha. The beautiful and beleaguered heart of South Africa is evoked in a healthy brew of tumbling prose and perfectly executed poetic vignettes. Autobiographical and exacting. It machetes a swathe through personal observation, love and loss, referencing obscure (for us) South African pop bands. Paul Auster, Boris Pasternak. Shimmering in the heat of this cauldron of words are the family. Friends. Loves and get the heart of this book an emotional map of a beloved country torn apart and a man also perhaps by political, personal, tragic, comic and calamitous change evident throughout this book. Recommend would be too mild a word for this book. I insist that you read it. Insist that you see for yourself how powerful literature can be, how daringly delivered and how fearless and how the personal is always universal and impinges on us all. Yes yes yes."

Kevin Cadwallender