Under dark under branches, Joan Metelerkamp’s tenth collection, continues the explorations of her recent book-length poems, opening out to five generations of family history and to the wider context of national history.

The assured music of the writing carries dialogues, lyrical passages, and fragments of narrative. Five years after leaving South Africa, the poet mourns the torn-out roots of her life – her community, environment and ancestors left behind in a country no longer her home.

Joan Metelerkamp has perfected a voice which weaves its repetitions and hesitations into a powerful tool, revealing how love and illumination have to be struggled for in daily routine and tedium. Into the day breaking describes a domestic world face to face with the dry contours and harsh economics of a small sawmill community in the southern Cape, and traces those not always visible connections that tie us to each other and to the earth. Metelerkamp is always meticulous in her search for the exact word and image to serve her quest for a new language: I say to chattering consciousness: walk; take your body through pines on pale clay leave me to look up at the mountains the bush, the blue - I say to the willing mind move over, move let me be - I am waiting for something like some Word, some words, to take me -

Burnt Offering is Joan Metelerkamp's seventh colllection of poems. The title comes from a poem in a cycle that embodies the labours of the medieval alchemists - heating and burning, transformation of passionate intensity, the search for an enduring element. In the process malignant doubt is burnt off, and what takes its place is trust in the everyday: "take this day, here, take it all its clarity, all its gold" - Like all of Metelerkamp's work, these generous poems draw on and weave together, with her distinctive energy and passion, the details of family and rural life, dreams, landscapes and journeys.

As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp’s work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the ‘sonnets’ ( ‘soundings’) of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book -: at its simplest it traces the story of a mother’s “letting-go” her grown children, a daughter’s relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!