Review of Gary Cummiskey's Romancing the Dead by Kobus Moolman

With the appetite of a new razor blade, Gary Cummiskey’s latest collection Romancing the Dead (Tearoom Books, Durban), slices through pretence and politeness. It is tough writing. It is uncomfortable. In your face. Tough and uncomfortable and in your face the way Lesego Rampolokeng is, or Cormac McCarthy, in his early novels – Child of God and Outer Dark.

But unlike these two authors, Cummiskey’s eye and ear are far too world-wise (and weary) to take themselves very seriously. He knows that it is through ‘sleeping on a razorblade’ that he has acquired his poetic sensibility, but also admits that he likes his ‘reality stirred with milk and honey’.

So, a contradiction. A paradox that runs through all of his writing: beauty and horror in the same breath; intense lyricism and feverish crudity. And in a truly exceptional poem like “Blue just like the Sky”, he pulls this tension off with great skill. It is a poem that baffles the reader, and at the same time lures them on to continue discovering more and deeper levels of reality and imagination. How else are we to approach my favourite lines, ‘Do not mix with murdered sheep or with the remains of children. The jet plane there is easy to swallow’, except by disassembling our narrative minds, and reading instead with eyes that look at the world slantways?

Romancing the Dead is the second book brought out by Tearoom Books, an independent press in Durban. Run by Pravasan Pillay and Jenny Kellerman-Pillay it aims, according to its blurb, to ‘publish pamphlets of contemporary poetry, fiction, non-fiction and humour’.

Tearoom Book’s first publication was Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay, a collection of off-the-wall, but trenchant, three-line and two-line poems. Hooray for small publishers, I say. They are often the only ones brave (or crazy) enough to take on work as provocative and uncomfortable as Cummiskey’s latest.