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A pretty book, launched at a pretty venue. Birds Cafe on Bree St. is one of Cape Town’s most popular lunch spots, the apogee of rustic chic in the city. The usual milk crate seats and door-and-sawhorses tables were cleared away for poets on Saturday morning, but the birdsong - supplied by a turntable spinning behind a curtain - twittered right along throughout.

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Book launch gadflies were offered a tough choice between two luminaries for their evening fluttering tonight: at the Centre for the Book, reknowned Afrikaans poet Petra Müller, who read at the release of her first collection of verse in English, Night Crossing (Tafelberg); and at the V&A Waterfront, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, subject of John Allen’s new biography, the clunkily-titled A Rabble Rouser for Peace (Random House). (Allen was also, incidentally, in attendance.)

Petra Muller

If your gadfly timing was good, however, you could have flitted from one event to the other for the best parts of each.
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Ingrid de Kok’s book Seasonal Fires was launched this evening in Kalk Bay, inside the high-ceilinged bakery of the famed Olympia Cafe, as a kind of coda to the Cape Town Book Fair. The poet Karen Press introduced her: “Ingrid’s gaze is steady but also tender.”

Spotted in the crowd (in no particular order): Jeremy Cronin, John Samuel, Sue Clark, Amina Mama, Dominique le Roux, Mike Cope, Julia Martin, Helen Moffett, Annari van der Merwe, Hugh Hodge, Finuala Dowling, Ignatius Ticha, Tony Morphet, John Higgins, Neville Alexander and Gus Ferguson.

The first poem Ingrid read was in honor of someone absent, Luke Fiske: “When Children Leave” (p. 139).

Karen Press
…at the Olympia Cafe’s bakery, introducing Ingrid de Kok.