Beverly Rycroft
Image: Tatyana Levana
Image: Shawn Benjamin
Book Reviews
Michèle Betty
A Private Audience By Beverly Rycroft Dryad Press, 2017
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n her latest collection of poems, Beverly Rycroft (BEd 1986, MEd 1988) revisits her difficult relationship with her father, her childhood in the Eastern Cape, thoughts on her country and the lifethreatening illness she’s had to confront. “I wrote myself to a place of love for my father where I can rest and laugh and grieve,” she says, adding Yeats’ words: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” Although this process goes deeply and courageously into difficult places, it is not self-absorbed. Rycroft aims to strike a chord with readers experiencing similar things, such as the death of a parent. She says of her father, who died in 2008: “He was complex but never afraid to own up to that and to try to make it right.” Rycroft believes poetry connects people, regardless of time and identity. The rhythm and richness of Shakespeare, for instance,
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she says, resonates across cultures. The former teacher has seen poetry’s value in classrooms. “When you’re growing up, the world can be a challenging and cruel place. Poetry is a way to contain the confusion and see the beauty of the world. And as a teacher, you want your student to feel the ‘shock of the familiar’ – when they recognise and relate to something that’s expressed in a new way.” Rycroft’s first collection, Missing, won the Ingrid Jonker prize in 2012, and she has also published a novel, A Slim, Green Silence (Umuzi 2015). Dryad Press was started by another Wits graduate and poet, Michèle Betty (BA 1993, LLB 1995). Formerly a corporate lawyer, she now edits New Contrast: The South African Literary Journal. Betty’s debut poetry collection, Metaphysical Balm (2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Ingrid Jonker prize.
