dumbfoundry

SHEILA Cussons, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 82, was one of the greatest poets the Afrikaans language has produced.

She was also an admired visual artist. By the age of 21 she had had a number of exhibitions, including six in Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the great South African artist Jean Welz once predicted she would become one of the country’s most important artists. [...]

In 1943, Cussons left to study art in London. She did not return to South Africa until 1979. By that time she had published three volumes of poetry, and it was mostly as a poet that she became celebrated. [...]

There was nothing simpering about her mysticism or her relationship with God. It was a very physical, bodily thing. She experienced God in concrete things, in a comma, in a turd, in the destructive force of nature. [...]

Her first volume of poetry, Plektrum, was published in 1970 (the same year Van Wyk Louw died). This was clearly the work of a mature poet who had spent years meditating, rewriting and polishing what appeared here. Many regard it as the best debut volume ever published in Afrikaans, and it won the Eugene Marais and Ingrid Jonker prizes. [...]

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