DRIVEN TO WORK

Author: Donald  Parenzee
Published by Ravan,  1985
Price: R6.50

REVIEWED  BY TONY  VOSS

In a  week  in  which  the  Anglo-American  Western  Deep  Levels  mine  gas
outrage has been  made public, it seems appropriate  to be reviewing a book
called Driven to  Work, Donald  Parenzee's impressive and moving collection
of poems. They  are  poems  of scrupulous  observation  of what  is more  and
more the life of ordinary South Africa's: to quote some titles, Detention of an
Ordinary Girl, Being Driven to Work, Fire inBonteheuwel on 17 June 1980, Then
the Children Decided, Miner's  Demands. "In  the unlikely  event" as the  air
hostess says, of a Parenzee poem faltering, it is because the reckless balance
between the personal and the historical is disturbed. Generally the surprising
inevitability of these poems gives them an assured rhythm from  first to last.
Each  of  the  three  sections  of  this  collection  has  an  epigraph  from  Yannis
Ritsos  but  the  poems  remind  me more of  Montale  and  The Hitler Spring.
Many readers will recognize what Parenzee is writing about — living in South
Africa  now, and the poet sees and says what he shares with children, miners,
clerks; how little he can  do and  how much can be done; how we are victims
and  agents. And  he earns  his wide-angle  detachment  because  he has  faith:
how  powerfully  he  uses  words  like  "always"  ('First  Steps',  'Always')  and
"forever"  ('In  the Morgue'). Like Montale he sees that

. . . this ulcered

Spring will still be festival, if it can  freeze  again
In death  that  death.

{The Hitler Spring, tr Maurice  English)

Critical  Arts  Vol  4  No  2  1986