Returning Signs: Shadows in poetic view of urban spaces

I hope Sean MacGinty’s Botsotso publication, Returning Signs, receives the attention it deserves. His work engages with or references various places in South Africa from an empathetic perspective. It represents an intersection between social geography, vexed as it often is in South Africa, and poetry.

His opening poem, "Microlight," is set in Durban. The poem is edgy in many different ways. A sense is given of a world not well adjusted to itself. The poem signals very clearly that life, as the poet sees it, is a journey of adjustment, of trying to find meaning in the time "in which you were born".  The cut-open shark, in the middle of the poem, conveys a sense of foreboding, but also signals the poet's willingness to delve into uncomfortable issues.

 The poem "Alonnisos" paints tension between idyllic things and those that unsettle, something South Africans are all too familiar with. The poem introduces issues of language, which is pertinently taken up elsewhere in the book. Set in island spaces, the “breezes of pleasure” abound; at the same time there is the ordinary: an elderly man “swatting away the horseflies” and “the cooks smashing up an octopus” on the jetty, and an eerie wind on “the day we left.”

 The many Cape Town poems give a real sense of MacGinty’s skillful use of words to, at once, create well-fashioned and striking poetry and his capacity to artistically grapple with history and social arrangements. His poems capture the aesthetically striking setting of Cape Town as well as the shadows and frayed edges. In the poem "In Cape Town: In All Seasons," he writes:

    In this place where clouds gather (stanza 1)

    fynbos  shrubs…../,,, drained of colour (stanza 3)

    autumn … seep[s] like something heartless, slow and numb (stanza 4)

    what else can be said …/ than the sinking weight of this place’s past/(stanza 5)

Beyond Cape Town -- a place evoked in ten of the poems -- there lies a wider horizon to explore. MacGinty’s poetic journey fans outward, touching a range of other places.

He takes us to Plettenberg Bay, where in seaside-town mode, he is aware of contradictions in the holiday town. We travel with him to Limpopo, where the lines, “you could dive deeper,” signal that we could all would all be enriched if we opened ourselves to the smaller languages of our land. He writes “The words were in your eyes/I could see them rise and crest.”

 With the poet, we visit Odendaalrus and “the classrooms as clean as can be given the dumpsite next door.” Then on to Overberg, where fields of canola annually yellow hill after hill. About this area, the poet writes: “[a] cluster of windmills watches you.” These are not just descriptions. These reflect a poet engaging with space and engaging with his country.

 In the Cape poems as well as others, MacGinty conveys the perspective of the outsider. In one of the poems, he talks of a wind that “blows the past through you/pushing you further and further outside.” The poet is a seeker. He is curious about things that are “awkward” and don’t quite fit; he also has a sixth sense for the ghosts that stalk our towns and cities. In a poem set in the Berg, the writer is conscious of the stillness that breaks and “a wind/cursed never to arrive.”

 The poem "Superposition" brings to the fore a strong personal voice, one that reveals a deep yearning for connection. In the poem, the poet explores the connection between "myself" and the other person; the speaker actively reaches out. The quest is to "out-listen/each other." The poem is a work rich with connotations of the higher self: a perspective capable of truly 'seeing' others and finding spaces of mutuality and interbeing.

 In terms of form, there is a notable tightness in the writing and in the way the poems settle on the page. "Nqwebasaurus thawzi" is composed of four quatrains, while "Berg Wind," like many others in the collection, unfolds in three‑line stanzas. A few poems lean toward narrative poetry, though -- as "After the Fire" demonstrates -- they remain deeply poetic in texture. In "Sunday Outing", with lines such as “the father then brought the car to a halt” and “(t)hen they resumed their journeys,” the narrative element is powerfully present, but so is the poetic.

In the final third of the book, MacGinty shifts gears entirely. The poems turn toward a South American connection, shaped and informed by a period of stay there. This new focus brings a dynamic element to the collection, extending MacGinty’s poetry even as it extends us, ordinary South African readers, long accustomed to isolation and cut off from wider currents of the world. These poems raise the question of how, in living elsewhere, an African native locates themselves and continues the quest to feel settled in the world. They suggest that dwelling in other places need not be a zero-sum calculation (of being completely uprooted from one locality and expecting quick, uncomplicated absorption in the other). Rather, it can be a further phase in a life journey, enriched by the conversation between the two settings. Such moves can open up broader, more inclusive senses of belonging, showing how identity is enriched through open-minded engagement with new geographic spaces.

Returning Signs is engaging and dynamic. It explores various settings memorably and distinctively, but returns to the question of whether the self can find moments of grounding and inner calm amid the "toing and froing," and the shadows that linger under the surface or in the corners of the pictures being sketched. In the book, MacGinty uses poetry to navigate South Africa’s present, revisit its urban spaces and proffer a compelling connection with the reader.

Returning Signs is published by Botsotso.