Wild Seed | Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies

Herman Charles Bosman

This book in the Anniversary Edition is edited by Stephen Gray. For the first time the complete poems of Herman Charles Bosman are gathered together here in one volume.

This collection contains all the 120 pieces that are recoverable, written between his student days in the mid-1920s and his untimely death in 1951. His four pamphlets – The Blue Princess, Mara, Rust and Jesus, an Ode – are reproduced without cuts. Included also are several previously uncollected poems left in manuscript, together with his experimental prose-poem “Gardenias”, which led to a court case in 1932 and its suppression.

Arranged in chronological order, this sequence reveals a romantic and prophetic Bosman, his growing devotion to a democratic African and the south, by turns erotic and esoteric, while he develops the deeply lyrical and humorous skills he considered the essence of his life’s work.

To supplement the poetry, also included is a selection of a dozen essays he wrote on the topic of its application to the turmoil of the 1930’s and the artistic revival of the Postwar World centred on Johannesburg.

With an introduction, illustration and notes on the texts.