Kaplyn | Poetry & Poetry Anthologies

Gilbert Gibson

In Kaplyn Gibson takes his exposure of the brewing tension underlying the mundane to a staggering intensity. Some of the motifs and themes from his debut are still present: war, medicine, love, the Bible and literature. But he now expands on these with an investigation into the essence of poetry.

The central metaphor in this case is the cleared borderline. During the South African Frontier War the cleared borderline was a piece of land on the battle front that had been cleared and on which the tracks of those who had passed that way could be seen. In this context the tracks are signs of life, of an earlier presence, but as such they are also signs of absence, danger and death. In this poetry words are such tracks – paradoxically signs of presence and absence, power and powerlessness, life and death.

But it is precisely in surrendering to the contradictions inherent to words that Kaplyn testifies to artistic self-confidence. It is the work of a poet who, with confidence in his own power of expression, speaks with and against his own history, and counter to the tradition of poetry. The bare and terse poetry of Gibson’s debut is still present, the clinical tone that always undermines sweet sentiment. But he shifts his boundaries, inter alia by way of drawn-out verses characterised by a cascade of image upon image, a turbulent flood of words that specifically flies in the face of the impotence of words.

Kaplyn is a collection that is also supported by the supposition that the power of poetry is grounded in its own impotence. And that is one of the measures of artistic maturity.