Indeed!



Nicolette van der Walt, as a poet, and as a human, is an inspiration to many. She holds high such poets as Neruda and Paz as writers of love poetry, but when I take a brief foray into the genre, it is Nicolette I would hope to emulate.

Her graceful phrasing makes me hungry for love, for heartache, for Africa, flowers, and the moist hothouse where language may incite people, themselves, to bloom in the shining sun of her stanzas.

Time after time, when I am self-exiled to some Plathian drama of desperation, I seek out evidence of her rising sap to bloom again. Lost love smells as sweet when it blooms beneath her soft pen.

Once, mired in my own bog, I read her, and at once, I was off, driving to a literal bog to keep company with a pitcher plant for a couple hours. This single bloom, in it's own ray of sun, insistant in the quagmire, waited in beauty to drink of insects, to complete a circle that Nicolette would drink with stars in her eyes, even as a butterfly struggled. This, for me, sums up her work. Reading her simply makes me a better human.


Rob Ganson, Poet, Human