ZERO SUMMER

84pp., paperback, Dryad Press, Cape Town, 2026

ISBN: 9781049223988

This collection of poems traces the hidden connections that bind our inner lives to the larger forces of nature and history, immersing us in a stark landscape of alienation, extinction and the spectre of an ending era.

"Reading Zero Summer, I felt like I was in the audience of a twenty-first century shaman, one able to capture the temper of global times, of our mass ennui, of millions of petabytes of unmemorable content, and turn it into rarefied, pastiche-free art. This is the work of serious poetry: sly, witty, sardonic, well-read and well-surfed, maudlin at the right times, and delicate yet fragile. And the shaman doesn't browbeat us. 'Look into it', he says, 'and leaves the room.'" Rustum Kozain

Simon van Schalkwyk works at the Department of English Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. In recent years he has acted as Head of Department, as co-editor of Safundi and as academic editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books. A recipient of the Philip Stein Award for Poetry, he is the author of the poetry collection Transcontinental Delay (2021) and the academic monograph, Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War: Containment, Leakage, Anarchy (2025).