Signs for an Exhibition

“Speaking as a psychoanalyst and neuroscientist: these poems reveal the nature and structure of the mind more beautifully than anything else I have read. They are completely true. Speaking as someone who grew up in the same South Africa as Eliza Kentridge: her poems remember how it really was for those of us who knew about the horrors but did not suffer them. They are personal and modest yet have far-reaching implications, profoundly ethical, an authentic gift to us all.”
Mark Solms

“Eliza Kentridge’s luminous Signs for an Exhibition is not so much a collection of discrete poems as a single continuous work that acquires increasing rhythmic and semantic power with each passing page. The poet’s agile movement from demotic utterance to perceptual fragment to tantalizing narrative moment do nothing less than create the startling illusion of having entered the fluctuations of another person’s intimate memories. This is a remarkable first book.”
Siri Hustvedt

“Kentridge’s poems offer a direct line to her childhood and teenage years when she was ‘stapling the pages of myself together’. They are studded by sparks of metaphors and by a lightness of tone, a lack of melodrama.”
Megan Hall

“These poems are beautiful… like reading a piece of blue sky…
This voice originates on the ridge of white waters, and runs like a clear stream.
This book is a tribute to an extraordinary mother, and a daughter’s words a tributary flowing from a wellspring of love and grace and tact.
Images ‘ flit softly’ through the poems ‘like swallows’ and ‘ripen like peaches in a blue bowl’.”
Dominique Botha