Stuart Payne Poetry
Voices from Another Room (Crane River, ISBN 978-0-620-81226-9)
About
Stuart Payne was born and lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where he volunteers for the Off the Wall poetry group and Stanzas magazine. He studied English at the University of Cape Town, later taking French classes at the Alliance française du Cap and working in animal rescue. You can explore some of his poems here.
His first book, Voices from Another Room, was published in 2018 by Douglas Reid Skinner’s Crane River Press, distributed by uHlanga.
He was the winner of the 2022 New Contrast National Poetry Prize for his poem “Words for Dia!kwain”.
Voices from Another Room (Crane River, ISBN 978-0-620-81226-9)
“Payne’s debut collection is, to my mind, one of the best poetry books to appear on the local poetry scene in recent years; his poems are
beautifully constructed, assured, and sensitive… I highly recommend this book to all lovers of poetry: you will be moved and delighted.”
~ Elisa Galgut, Stanzas 14
“an elegant collection of poems”
~ Wamuwi Mbao, New Contrast 51
“The sense of a lived life is moving, with loss and absence the major themes. Payne can also tell a story and paint a picture, the South African
landscape occasionally opening out into a Mediterranean vision, while never losing sight of an ironic detail, as when ‘a cat… kneads a lap’.
This is an original voice in South African verse, and readers will want to keep his book within reach, ‘to recreate a world of missing words’.”
~ Tony Voss
Book Details
Voices from Another Room
The carefully modulated surface of Stuart Payne’s poems belies the intriguing, startling and thought-provoking depths… his universe is both vivid and uncertain as past, present and future are considered and reconsidered, and the distance between minds is sensed and explored.
~ Tony Voss