A great teacher passes - Prof Stephen Watson.

Been a long time since I saw the Professor, but his passing from cancer touched me deeply.
A great soul of South African poetry and literature has passed.
My love and condolences to his wife and family.
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en.wikipedia.org...
southafrica.poetryinternationalweb.org...

A fond memory:
book.co.za...

I first met Stephen Watson many years ago in, of all places, the Pig and Whistle in Rondebosch. A group of writers would gather there some Fridays for lunch. Stephen had a copy of Czeslaw Milosz’s Bells in Winter which he’d just bought. I’d not read Milosz so he insisted I take the book home. There was one poem in that collection that for me would become a description of Stephen: ‘Stalking a deer, I wandered deep into the mountains and from there I saw.’ I spent a brief few minutes with Stephen last Monday. He quoted two lines from Bertolt Brecht: ‘I do not like the place I have come from./ I do not like the place I am going to.’ There was a fierce light in his eyes. In the end we have Stephen’s poetry: ‘We know/ what my grandfather knew:/ that all people/ become spirit people/ when dead, / that their powers live on/ long after their death.’ The last stanza of The Powers of the Dead from Return of the Moon – Versions from the /Xam. – Mike Nicol