Tony Voss
Tony Voss was born in Swakopmund in 1935. He was educated at St George’s Grammar School, Cape Town; Rhodes University, Grahamstown; and the University of Washington, Seattle.
He taught English in universities until he retired from the service of the then University of Natal in 1995. Throughout his career Voss has been an incisive critic of South African poetry. The Mushroom Summer of Skipper Darling, published by Crane River, is his first book of poetry. Currently he lives in Sydney, Australia.
Selected Work: Trombone
– for an African jazz pioneer
A one, a two, a three – and for the first phrase
flowering into a bar a line appears
to find a tune, falling or rising, lays
down a beat, to meet the slide that hears
an air beyond, sounding below the bell,
ringing around our ears, against the teeth:
so la ti, singing now, and we can tell
something to count on now, something beneath.
We breathe together, and our history
is still a favourite of Mozart,
starts in the time of Dorsey, leads a parade:
melody matters in the mind and heart,
runs with saliva to the water key:
we live as if we were what we have made.
Bibliography
2019. The Mushroom Summer of Skipper Darling, published by Crane River