The good life, The dirty life, and other stories

the long version

Adam Schwartzman is an African writing of African experiences. His poems are 'stories' which build together into a larger narrative of lives lived in the shadow of violence and division. The poems were, for the most part, written in the three years preceding the transfer of power in South Africa in April 1994. In four closely integrated sections Schwartzman weaves together his main themes to evoke a growing individual and an altering community. The first part deals with the changing face of the country and includes poems that mythologise urban South Africa and the conditions that shape it. Part two, more lyrical in nature, relives childhood relationships, the observations informed by a love affair. In the third section he writes a powerful elegy for his grandfather whose death defines what determine his own perspectives, being Jewish and white in South Africa. The last section refracts the earlier lights through emotionally different lenses. . In this collection Schwartzman emerges fully fledged as a poet of substance.