Two landscapes (Stephen Symons - 2012) in response to Stephen Watson's poem A Kromrivier Sequence.
The late Stephen Watson (1954 –2011) has a unique poetic imprint of Cape Town and its surrounding regions, particularly the Cedarberg. Watson’s A Kromrivier Sequence, included in his volume Presence of the Earth (1995) serves as a touchstone in understanding the poet’s relationship with the South African landscape, as well as specific localities in the post-apartheid period. Dirk Klopperargues that ‘in his focusing of consciousness on the act of consciousness itself, on its individual path of desire, its own play of presence and absence, Watson is a romantic himself’(Klopper 2013: 87-98). Klopper’s assertions become apparent when one examines the position of Watson’s physical presence within his topographical spaces, often at a self-imposed distance, allowing for constant shifts between presence, absence and even alienation.
The following excerpt from The Mountain Light at Kromrivier of Watson’s A Kromrivier
Sequence reveals those Romantic inclinations[1]:
In the detachment of this light, detachment of late autumn in its cooled, soundless stare, in the pure transparence stillness creates, there comes a moment when everything goes clear. (Watson 1995: 58).
[1] Klopper asserts, ‘Watson’s affiliation with romanticism is nowhere more evident in his series of poems A Kromrivier Sequence. The fusion of word and life, the formal and the sensual, to create what Friedrich Schiller calls ‘living form’ (1967,101), that privileged aesthetic space where the artist engages in a creative play of consciousness with representations, is common to all varieties of romanticism’ (Klopper 1998: 91).