Zero Gravity

About the Book

My poetry covers a great range in verbal style, tone and subject matter. It is often markedly ironic and/or satirical, particularly when dealing with social or political issues. The poetry also tends to want to explore spiritual and/or philosophical questions, and can be seen to reflect the poet’s English ancestry (and literary heritage), his sense of the history and changing political landscape of South Africa, and to raise the great conundrums regarding the place of human beings in a cosmos that science is revealing is far stranger than we thought, perhaps stranger than we ever could have imagined. Lastly, the poems – particularly those written over the last few years -- can show a somewhat playful, even irreverent, attitude to the idea of poets and poetry that we can characterize as “postmodern”, but which – for all their playfulness and reference to popular culture – raise concerns about the future of poetry and the human values with which poetry has always strongly identified, in our globalized, mass-media world of the sound bite and the visual image.

About the Author

Damian Garside was born in a small town close to the city of Manchester in the North of England in 1953. In 1964 my family emigrated to South Africa, where, apart from a 3 year stint as a postgraduate student of English at Manchester University, he has lived ever since (the last 5 of which married to Modiegi). His interest in writing poetry began in the early 1980s. Since then he has written a great deal of poetry, particularly in the last few years, and had a number of poems published in South African literary journals and poetry magazines, as well as having a few anthologized in books such as The Paperbook of South African English Poetry (edited by Michael Chapman). At present Garside (who holds a Ph D in English from the University of Cape Town) teaches media, culture and communication on the Mafikeng Campus of North West University. Mafikeng is a town in the North West Province of South Africa that was once famous for the siege it endured during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) Zero Gravity is the first collection of Garside’s poetry to be published.