On Sunday, July 10, at St Mary the Virgin, St Mary in the Marsh, the familiar and the foreign came together to feature both setting and performer: English church hosting once-exiled South African poet, again, white washed walls and chancel offering CJ “Jonty” Driver quiet space to recite his poem sequence, “Before.”
In clear colonial voice, employing practised iambics, Driver told of his childhood and youth in South Africa. To link the twenty two poems, he used the effective device of referring to a recurring lifetime dream, where “the soldier, kitbag on his back . . . trudges . . . along an empty road and into town,” a man he has never identified, though wished he could.
Driver’s journey takes him back to homeland, to boyhood friendships, white and black, to questionable foundations of family money, to adolescent growth spurts, to portraits of distasteful curate or schoolboy friend becoming lethal helicopter pilot, and on into imprisonment, his own admitted frailty there, and to his rage against apartheid but also the deep love he has, nevertheless, for his country and its countrymen.
“I think of friends long dead: I think of you, Templeton Mdlalana, and I smile.”
Such elegiac verse, however, was not the sole entertainment. Interspersed throughout, violinist Peter Fields took us, often hauntingly, from one poem cycle to the next, with skilfully played pieces – Dvorak’s “Humoresque”, Elgar, a hornpipe, the Skye Boat Song, Windmills of your Mind, to name a few. Well played, Peter!
Driver concluded by asking, “So was it me who walked into that dream,” that life, its characters and experiences, wisdom acquired, love passing through, the call to God that did not come? Jonty doesn’t know but all of us there did know and appreciated the lyric quality of his poetic art: a worthy foreigner standing, and outstanding, in a marshland church.
Photo: Rye News library