CULLINAN, Patrick

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Nationality: South African. Born: Pretoria, 21 May 1932. Education: Charterhouse, Surrey; Magdalen College, Oxford, 1950–53,B.A. and M.A. in Italian and Russian 1953. Career: Farmer and sawmiller, eastern Transvaal, 1953–79. Since 1963 freelance writer. Co-founder of Bateleur Press; editor, The Bloody Horse, 1980–81; lecturer, English department, University of the Western Cape, 1982–92. Awards: Olive Schreiner award, 1980; Pringle prize, 1983, 1984, 1990; Sanlam Literary award, 1989. Address: Silver Spring, Hout Bay Road, Constantia 7800, South Africa.

Publications

Poetry

The Horizon Forty Miles Away. Johannesburg, Polygraph, 1973.

Today Is Not Different. N.p., 1978.

The White Hall in the Orchard. Cape Town, David Philip, 1984.

Selected Poems 1961–1991. Johannesburg, Artists' Press, 1992.

Selected Poems, 1961–1994. Plumstead, South Africa, Snailpress, 1994.

Transformations. Plumstead, South Africa, Carapace Pets, 1999.

Short Stories

Surprisingly Short Stories. London, Minerva, 1998.

Other

Robert Jacob Gordon 1743–1795: The Man and His Travels at the Cape. Cape Town, Winchester-Struik, 1992.

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Critical Study: "The Maker and the Job," in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, edited by M.J. Daymond and others, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, University of Natal Press, 1984.

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Patrick Cullinan is unique among South African poets in that his work, though reflecting the country of his birth and the place where he lives, reveals a sophistication and modernism that give it a dimension far beyond the local. This comes from his profound knowledge of the cultures and literatures of Europe and his fluency in Italian, French, and Russian, with consequent influences of Dante, Montale, Rimbaud, and Mandelstam among others. He has also resisted the pressure of fashion, in his view the enemy of art, that would make poetry the servant of politics. His work may therefore survive in the postapartheid South Africa, when much of what his contemporaries have written comes to be filed as sociopolitical history.

Some of this can be explained by Cullinan's origins and unusual upbringing, the irony of which has not been lost on him and which he refers to with wit in such poems as "Sir Tom" and "The Billiardroom." His grandfather Sir Thomas Cullinan, whose name is associated with the famous diamond that is part of the British crown jewels, created a colonial family dynasty with a great fortune from mining and industry. It was an unlikely environment in which to nurture a poet, and Cullinan's father was to show little more than contempt for his son's inclinations. Soon after World War II the son was sent to school at Charterhouse, in England, surprisingly since by that time South Africa's English-speaking elite had ceased to send their children "home" to be educated. Then came Oxford. Cullinan was twenty-one by the time he returned to South Africa. But with his European languages and the works of Europe's literary giants in his baggage he had treasure greater than family diamonds that he would call on in his work over the following years.

Was Cullinan now an exile from Europe or an African? One night in a cottage in the eastern Transvaal, confronted no doubt by the physical power of Africa, he had his answer. "I was an African and always would be," he recalled, "but that I have an enormous amount of Europe in my make-up is something that I would never want to deny." His African identity reveals itself in his poetry not so much as an evocation of the physical Africa, its landscapes, sights, and sounds, as in its history, particularly that of its early explorers and travelers. He has written a fine poem about the eighteenth-century French naturalist and explorer François Le Vaillant. (The Frenchman applied a certain poetic imagination, license even, in describing what he said he saw, which no doubt appealed to his great nephew Charles Baudelaire, who went to the Cape of Good Hope in 1847 and took a look himself.) Robert Jacob Gordon, another explorer of the same period, has long fascinated Cullinan, who spent fourteen years producing an impressive biography on him.

Cullinan, however, is above all a metaphysical poet, as his later poetry clearly shows. His preoccupation is with what one critic called a "modern sense of disquiet," an echo again of Montale and a search for answers to those eternal questions that like-minded poets ask themselves wherever they may be. From this Cullinan reflects upon the nature of poetry, how and why it is written; he writes poems about poems. What also emerges is Cullinan's skill in crafting verse, the infinite pains he takes to pare down his lines to the bare bones of sense and sound, as in some of his haunting love poems.

—Roy Macnab