Pretend You Don't Know Me: New and Selected Poems

By Finuala Dowling

Pretend You Don’t Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling’s funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems. It introduces this popular South African poet to a UK audience.

Finuala Dowling’s debut collection, I flying, published in 2002, was an instant success in her native South Africa. Its accessibility, humanity and wit, as well as its beguilingly honest stories of home, parenthood, love, loss and desperation, won many new converts to poetry. The volume went into multiple printings, and won the Ingrid Jonker prize. Dowling’s subsequent collections, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe and Notes from the Dementia Ward (winners of the SANLAM and Olive Schreiner prizes respectively), consolidated her reputation as an inventive sketcher of the domestic sublime. Her chapbook, Change is possible, sold out at the 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Pretend You Don’t Know Me contains her iconic poem ‘To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair’ as well as Dowling’s tragi-comic cycle of poems on the theme of her mother’s dementia, and the hugely popular poems ‘Butter’, ‘I am the Zebra’, ‘To adventurers, as far as I’m concerned’ and ‘The abuse of cauliflowers’. At the heart of the book are the funny and poignant connections we make with other people, and the lifelong effort to stay whole.

‘Dowling is redefining poetry, bringing her distinctive voice and wit to bear on a medium so often stuck in moody, broody times.’ – Arja Slafranca, The Star

‘Finuala Dowling is a brave new voice in South African poetry, filled with vitality, wit, unexpected rhythms and fresh ideas… Always accessible, Dowling’s poetry is never shallow.’ – Shirley Kossick,Mail&Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780374253

Finuala Dowling

Finuala Dowling established her literary career as a poet. Her first collection, I flying, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize, her second, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe, was a co-winner of the Sanlam Prize, and her third, Notes from the Dementia Ward, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Her previous novels are Flyleaf, Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, which won the 2012 M-Net Literary Award for English Fiction, and The Fetch. In addition to novels and poetry, Dowling has published short stories in national and international anthologies, and has had plays and skits performed on stage and radio. Dowling is currently Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at UCT. She has a D.Litt from Unisa, where she taught English for several years. She has also taught English and creative writing at the University of Stellenbosch.