Memory is the Thief of Time

About the Book

In Memory is the Thief of Time, it is clear that Matyobeni absorbed the texture of poetic artistry of great poets like W.B. Yeats, Roy Campbell and T.S. Eliot. This is evident in his poems “The wanderer” and “Holiness is Wholeness”. He has also taken flights into metaphysics. Influences from Marechera, Rampolokeng and Kgafela oa Magogodi are evident in his “Funk Psyche Avenue”, “Sick Trust”, “A Dirge of Elevation” and “Hoisting Flags of Obscenities”. Matyobeni’s poetry is also suffused with existential themes like ‘angst’, ‘despair’ and that of ‘death’ as related to nothingness. This owes to his love of Sartre and Nietzsche. Hence he claims that “poetry is a tool of construction and a weapon of destruction”.

About the Author

Simthembile Matyobeni has blended metaphysics and existential concerns into a cocktail of rhythmic poetry. Matyobeni’s poetry seeks to challenge the doppelganger of orthodoxy, which precludes unconventionality in art and constrains artistic liberty. Here is a poet that has brought together Marechera, Yeats, Rampolokeng, Eliot and Kgafela oa Magogodi in recognizing the universality of poetry. A poet that will motivate poetry fanatics and budding poets to rise to an extreme height of poetic imagination. A monster of dense imaginative poetry has been unleashed. In the heart of Matyobeni’s poetry is the realization that “[t]here is a fountain of still waters in the mind, and it runs deep. The mind is a microcosm of alive possibilities”. For Matyobeni imagination is concomitant of art; poetry. So that “a jarred mentality is an injured imagination”.