“The heart wants what it wants,” sings the American pop artist, actress and mental health advocate Selena Gomez on my mobile phone. I am sitting in the quiet of my room, alone, at peace. It is nearly midnight. I have just finished reading a chapter from Gai Eaton’s King Of My Castle. I am thinking of all things poetry, which can oftentimes be dark, yet thoughtful subject matter written about from a sensitive point of view. Tonight I am thinking of my poet-friend, Silke Heiss and her unfailing support. Poets know the pain of the mind. They acknowledge that pain of the mind in a whirlpool of action and specificity of decision on the page, in showing the subtle essence of the beginning, middle and end of the “moral idea”.
When something tragic happens to the poet, it gives us poems, the very definition of “inferno”. It gives us a book of lives, an overwhelming sense that both an ending, and a novel beginning is on the horizon. Her poems unfold in onion layers, they “evolve”, they transition and they are engineered by the design of an observer, a Nietzschean-philosopher.
As I re-read the poems from the collection Greater Matter: A Journey Of Poems To Death And Beyond that she had couriered to me, (we live in different cities, same country), Silke Heiss’ poetry offers up to me a fractured wind, the inescapable stories of the sea, a stolen kiss that resurfaces from memory, birds flying high. As I sip a cup of lukewarm Rooibos tea, her poetry silences me like a mirror, like the labels of “death”, “mourning”, “emptiness”, “solitude” and “grievous bodily harm” silences me.
Writing poetry, reading poetry is the “lesser death”. Her poetry drills wings into my organs. As I study these poems, I choke on my childhood, the domestic relationship of my parents, the sacrificial figurehead of my mother that I have placed on a pedestal for all of my life, and I swallow the lump in my throat, my adverse childhood experience. I have never belonged to someone, not really, not on those specific terms like she has. I have never been married. I have no children. I am just a poet. I have never been a fragile object in love, and nor have I been a loving nurturer, a companion. I am just the kind of poet who drills wings into the roots of poems, who watches them fly as high as birds.
Her poems make me think of the director’s treatment for a film, love stories found in books, causes to fight for, the aesthetics and the character traits of the romantic, her garden, her roses, her sea and the unique challenges she faces on a daily basis in her corner of the world. I want you to find her poems and read them. I want you to do a Google search on her. I want you, as I was, to be reminded of every act of love, the limitations of the individual at play, at rest, in being caregiver to a loved one and how that interpersonal dynamic changes when you have to learn to cope single-handedly. She cared for her poet husband Norman Morrissey, I care for a father. In her poetry she tells the reader that there are disconnections to be found in life, in self-acceptance, in unconditional love.
To understand man’s indifference, we must understand our action to response and who and why we choose to love. Life shrinks back from what it cannot endure. Despair is a passive torment but not in the poetry of Silke Heiss. Faith must exist for the individual to live. She truly lives the life of an artist. To read the poetry of this spiritual soldier is to discover all that is noble in the world. Her poetry is a mysterious and strange visitor in my room this time of the morning. I cannot sleep so I read her poems instead, the poetry that has firmly established this gifted writer’s reputation.
Silke Heiss has been writing poems since the age of nine. I have been writing since I was a child too. I used writing as a therapeutic instrument as a child. I needed that kind of outlet. Abandonment issues, mental cruelty, the strained mother-daughter relationship, a dysfunctional and abusive home life hovered, and writing was useful to me. It saved me. These matters were not up for discussion in apartheid South Africa. Writing offered me a shield. It protected me. In my poetry, I became a bird, a flower, a butterfly. In the only drawing of mine that was published in the children’s section of the weekend newspaper, I became a Bushman, hunting, gathering more of what I wanted at the time, which was life. I was greedy for the outside world and I suppose acceptance. I wanted to escape reality for the world had become too much for me to handle at eight years old.
“Silke’s writings were first published in 1990 and sporadically thereafter in a variety of South African journals and anthologies.
She has a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from UCT where she wrote a novel, The Drop Out, which won second prize in the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Competition in 2002. She won third prize in the Dalro Awards for a poem published in the literary journal New Coin during 2010 and she shared first prize for a story that she submitted for the Chinese Short Story Project jointly organised by the Confucius Institute and School of Languages at Rhodes University in 2011.
She was sponsored by the National Arts Council in 2005 and 2006 and used the opportunity to produce a short story collection, Preparations for his Future by Marvin Hurt, and a second novel, The Heathens. A few of the stories have been published in collections.
Her illustrated verse novel, The Griffin Elegy, was serialised in the prestigious literary journal New Contrast in 8 parts from 2007 – 2009.
She became a member of the Ecca poets in 2012 and has published poems with them regularly since then. She has created the cover art of the majority of Ecca publications since that year.
She has co-authored self-published books with her late husband, the poet Norman Morrissey, as well as two solo collections.”
Her newsletters are mentioned on her website. All the Nuggets are available on the website http://www.silkeheiss.co.za
