I like the sad little poems that poets write to themselves
when they’re sitting at windows on hot nights unable to write
anything worth calling a poem. They’re like drinks you buy
yourself in a bar on a rainy night when you’re feeling homeless and sub-human,
you look at the guy next to you and know he’s also going to have the hardest time
getting through the night, not even a dog would walk home with him,
you buy him a drink as well and neither of you starts a conversation…

from ‘The Sad Little Poems’

In Slowly, As If, Karen Press looks clear-eyed at what it means to live in a complex society, a fragile world. She celebrates the connectedness that sustains us – in dance, in love, with the natural world, in cities where ‘strangers seem happy / to let you be’ – and sees it betrayed by our unreflecting complicity in poverty and violence. The death of a child who ‘barely scratched the air of the country’ resonates in her tender, devastating account: ‘When a child dies, who is responsible?’

Slowly, As If asks hard questions with grace and wit, balancing the particular and the universal. ‘Being told / you’re made of stardust / is not helpful / as you sit holding a parking ticket’, but it is, none the less, a truth.

‘Photographing the building is forbidden until the war is over’     
Your Saddam     
Cyrus Vance sat on my couch    
The Daisy Cutter    
A cow and a goose    
Specialised    
Skypointing    
And all the time    
Monument to the South African Republic (on some photographs by David Goldblatt)    
Ravenous    
Eight frescoes from the lost palaces of Zanj
    the furious women bare themselves    
    the four students run for the border    
    he hides all night while they murder his family    
    they were caught and chained in a van    
    she gave birth while prison guards tortured her and laughed    
    a six-year-old boy is digging a grave for a baby    
    the colours there    
    like paper flowers unfolding in water    
Local fauna    
Be bear     
Non sequitur    
In the empty station    
Man series I    
Six eggs in the fridge    
Mindfulness    
Thank you Lee Smolin, thank you Mr Leibniz    
If you wrote about domestic things    
Once we did get out of the car    
Men always have an idea    
Shine    
The sad little poems    
Pasternak’s shadow    
Love songs for Lake Como    
Val di Bondo    
Amsterdam night    
Over there    
Ten minutes on a Sunday morning in July    
You never were much good at physics    
Breakfast    
Love and stories of love    
If he’d been called Jesse    
Letters to Tom    
Really, there’s nothing    
A man with no power    
Fast asleep    
Odd calculus    
On fire    
Whipped cream    
Do you love yourself like this    
Hotel Rwanda, 1 January 2006    
Praise poem: I saw you coming towards me    
Mnemonics    
A child can’t be born    
In Cameroon, August 2005    
The pool attendant at the First International Inn in Limbé    
The quality of postcards    
Elaine’s garden    
Three meditations on immortality     
Three meditations on Why is there war, Mummy?    
The last threshold    
The passivity of the spectator must be countered at all costs    
This is the bit where you live    
Literary biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet
Out on the ocean    
Closer than this – extracts from a source book for urban planners
    And on the eighth day    
    Connected    
    The things that survive are the things that survive    
    Statistics South Africa says    
    Unplace    
    City streets    
    To love it    
    Typology    
    The urban planner ruminates    
Uses of useful plants    
The one who dies    
Tango for person and city    
Deer on the freeway    
Riffs for the caring girl    
Great and true    
Phendukani Silwani    
Poem for which there was no title    
Folk dancing for beginners
    He sets the tone    
    So where were you    
    The laws of physics are inviolable    
    Take your places    
    Where to from here?    
    The coastline seems endless    
    It goes like this    
    You are here    
    Balancing    

Acknowledgements and notes