Joao is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is Joao of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for "John" and his epithet - "Place of Gold" - is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu. The linked poems reveal Joao not only as a cosmopolitan traveller, but also as someone sensative to others preconceptions to how they are also haunted by history. The book's concluding poems evoke a geneology for Joao's restlessness: Cape Town-born parents, Cape Malay friends, a Brazilian uncle, and the great-grandmother from an island, Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the Atlantic. In this book of richly dense sonnets John Mateer presents us with the experiences of someone who travels the world, like so many of us, to understand himself and his place in a shared, global history.

About the Author
John Mateer is a poet, writer and curator. His works - published in Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, Macau and Portugal - includes essays, books of poems, and Semar's Cave, a prose travelogue on Indonesia. For two decades he has published criticism on contemporary art. His latest poetry collections are Southern Barbarians, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award in Australia, Emptiness: Asian Poems 1998-2012, and Unbelievers, or `The Moor' (Shearsman Books, 2013), which has recently appeared Portuguese and German-language editions.


Book Information
ISBN 9781848616493
Author John Mateer
Format Paperback
Page Count 70
Imprint Shearsman Books
Publisher Shearsman Books
Weight(grams) 128g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 203mm * 4mm