On EPITAPHS AND DREAMS

A friend once said that poetry has that sacred ability to get to the most elemental truths without beating around some bushes, and I agreed fully. And having recently being introduced to the works of Patrick Fitzgerald, the statement holds indispensible truth more so as the anthology is an adept chronicle of very insurgent times in the not so distant history of the struggle for South Africa’s liberation. These renegade spills of soul matter; I still glance at the anthology to find a turbulent study of the aims of the struggle, where life was no series of terminations but renewals of strength in the face of villainous adversity.

A struggle veteran and liberation cadre himself, Patrick’s poetic simplicity seems to be an appropriate edifice that elicits the author’s personal memories of those harsh times spent in exile. Told from a vantage point not clouded by the smoke and bullets, nor nostalgia but a far reaching optimism about what is yet to be, his words stand as testament of the necessity of record for the overall human experience of a time. Words validating the realness of events, words that are from the beholder’s heart, while knowingly inclusive of the company of others.

 In a solitary way, he seems to have been gathering elements for a uniquely personal philosophy about the objectives of the struggle and these poems attest to a quest achieved. The section of the work aptly titled NECESSARY STRUGGLE stands as further proof that the animating power of words can bring times lost to the fore, laying claim to unique authenticity of recollection and uncensored emotions bred in reclusive contemplation.

And knowing how the past can be a volatile terrain to navigate; only miserly and skilled recollection can in fact dredge out the uncensored. In LOVE AND BLUES, forlorn memories are retold with such clarity and simplicity of language as though he was speaking in codes, and this is what captivates the mind about the man’s writing. His stories are not recitations of acts of valor or bravery, but those of perpetual failings and unabated hopes wrought in the paranoid chill of lonesomeness, clumsily versed without verbosity and boisterous words. Without enmity towards his fondest memories of love and losses, some poems are engaged in no ephemeral moments or events nor ravings about ‘interrupted sunsets’.

Entwined with a lacuna of voices from an era of turmoil, here wails another galvanizing our collective memory, the book appearing to represent phases in a life well-lived, yet invoking scars attained during those musical moments and bloodcurdling events, and when loneliness was in itself an event.

EPITAPHS AND DREAMS

Poems to remember the struggle 

By Patrick Fitzgerald

Porcupine Press info@porcupinepress.co.za