Zero Summer

Description

SYNOPSIS

Simon van Schalkwyk’s Zero Summer immerses the reader in a stark poetic landscape of alienation, extinction and the spectre of an ending era. Yet, despite these looming catastrophes, the collection is both daring and deeply human, offering a startling vision of contemporary life and its fragile, persistent beauty. With an expansive intellectual range, Zero Summer moves fluidly across themes and disciplines, demonstrating the poet’s capacious imagination and sharp engagement with contemporary life. It traces the hidden connections that bind our inner lives to the larger forces of nature and history. A work of formidable scope and originality, Zero Summer stands as a vital contribution to poetry’s ongoing dialogue with the world it seeks to illuminate.

ENDORSEMENT

“Reading Zero Summer, I felt I was in the audience of a twenty-first century shaman, one able to capture the temper of global times, of our mass ennui, of millions of petabytes of unmemorable content, and turn it into rarefied, pastiche-free art. This is the work of serious poetry: sly, witty, sardonic, well-read and well-surfed, maudlin at the right times, and delicate yet tensile. And the shaman doesn’t browbeat us. ‘Look into it,’ he says, and leaves the room.”

– Rustum Kozain

BIOGRAPHY

Simon van Schalkwyk works in the Department of English Studies at Wits University. In recent years, he has acted as Head of Department, as co-editor of Safundi and as academic editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books. He has an MA in Modern and Contemporary Poetry from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom; and his BA Hons and PhD degrees in English Literature are from the University of Cape Town. His poems have been widely published. He is a recipient of the Philip Stein Award for Poetry. His first collection of poetry, Transcontinental Delay (Dryad Press, 2021), was a finalist in the National Institute for the Humanities & Social Sciences Awards (Poetry Category), while his academic monograph, Robert Lowell’s Imitations and the Cold War: Containment, Leakage, Anarchy was published by Bloomsbury Academic in September 2025. Zero Summer is his second collection of poetry.