OTHER SIGNS

60pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2011

"Ingrid de Kok’s fifth collection of poems, Other Signs, offers a profound engagement with what it means to be South African. De Kok has published poetry that decidedly complicates any neat diagnosis of the South African condition since the late 1970s and her sustained examination of the particularity of her past and present puts to shame the recent debate on whiteness and questions of 'how to live in this strange place' ... De Kok has neither followed friend and fellow poet Antjie Krog in 'begging to be black' nor has she quietly retreated into a corner, pulling the duvet of white guilt over her head. Instead she has walked the hairline fault between the personal and the political. Here there are no pre-established positions, but a constant navigation of shifting circumstances ... pushing at the boundaries of what can be said, reminding us over and over of what we would rather forget and finding ways to speak our silences." Mail & Guardian

Ingrid de Kok has published three previous collections of poetry, Familiar Ground (1988), Transfer (1997), and Terrestrial Things (2002), as well as the collection Seasonal Fires, new and selected poems (2006). She has been awarded the Herman Charles Bosman prize, a SALA prize and the 2019 Fondazione Cultural e Arte prize. She lives in Cape Town.