Painting the Bamboo Tree

Gail Dendy began writing seriously in 1990, and selections from her first poetry collection Assault and the Moth were published in the UK in 1993 by Harold Pinter. An internationally trained dancer, she now works as a freelance writer and editor and is currently gaining a reputation as a playwright. This, her first full-length collection, is published for the first time in the UK.

In her mesmerising first collection, Gail Dendy unleashes a panoply of sound, smells, colours, rhythms from her native South Africa in a sequence of poems which, though dealing with the familiar, the intimate and the every-day, have a haunting strangeness. The natural world, and particularly the garden, is ever-present in these poems, its disinterested beauty a backdrop for the bitter-sweet emotions which underlie so much of Dendy's work. A gentle yet powerful collection.

Paperback
60 pages
ISBN 0-900072-20-3
Published January 1999

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