Joao: (sonnets)

Joao is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is Joao of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for John and his epithet - Place of Gold - is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu. The linked poems reveal Joao not only as a cosmopolitan traveller, but also as someone sensative to others preconceptions to how they are also haunted by history. The book’s concluding poems evoke a geneology for Joao’s restlessness: Cape Town-born parents, Cape Malay friends, a Brazilian uncle, and the great-grandmother from an island, Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the Atlantic. In this book of richly dense sonnets John Mateer presents us with the experiences of someone who travels the world, like so many of us, to understand himself and his place in a shared, global history.