AVBOB issued the following media release:
Does reading your favourite poems sometimes make you feel restless, ready to set out on a very long journey?
We have known for millennia that poems, songs and stories can transport us in this way. It is also true that some poets have literally been great travellers.
On Global Tourism Resilience Day on February 17, the AVBOB Poetry Project celebrated the work of Justin Fox, poet and novelist, inveterate traveller and travel writer. His debut poetry collection, Beat Routes (Karavan Press, 2021) is based on his travels through much of South Africa as well as parts of Europe and North America.
Fox, a former editor of Getaway Magazine, has been writing poetry since he was at school.
“In those days I was trying to emulate the greats. Later, I spent six months at sea on a replica of an 18th-century caravel sailing from Portugal to South Africa. I began writing sea poems, which developed into an interest in landscape poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, mentored by Stephen Watson. Later still, I spent three months meandering through Europe and wrote poetry almost every day. Even back then, I had the vague notion that I would one day like to publish my travel poems in an anthology of sorts, but it took nearly three decades to make it happen.”
Fox’s fascination with landscape has taught him to evoke many different places in exquisite detail. But, of course, his mind is not a camera, passively recording memorable people and places. He chronicles inner as well as outer journeys, allowing us to travel with him and to negotiate the environments he describes. In the process, we witness signs of corporate greed and corruption, as well as the camaraderie of friends and strangers.
Celebratory voice
“My understanding of the world grows progressively darker,” he admits. “But I do find solace in nature, particularly the sea, and that is where I still find my celebratory voice.”
Fox confirms that turning to poetry has been a profound pleasure: “There is a profound, deeply satisfying curiosity at work in these poems. “Ah, the fence lines go on forever,” he laments in “N1”, which opens the collection. Like him, we are left wondering what is on the other side of those fences.
“Writing poetry while travelling, or about travel, forces you to perceive with a very precise eye. And so, when I am writing about travel, particularly in my poems, I am compelled to look at and think more deeply about place. Capturing the ‘spirit of place’ is what much of my poetry strives for … and that entails as much an inner, as an outer, quest.
“The whole publishing process with Karavan Press was a delight. After 20 years of writing fiction and non-fiction books, it was a great pleasure to work on something as refined, contained and joyful as a poetry collection.”
While there is no shortage of discomfort on the road, the quests described here are often joyous. There are references to beloved songs and musicians and sly, beautiful parodies of favourite poems by Shelley, Frost and Yeats. In the beautiful “Land Song”, Fox playfully channels the voices of an entire country:
I am the ear of my nation, listening …
to the growl of traffic, the crash of waves,
to the rumbling murmurs of discontent …
An older law
Legoland of Hillbrow, burnished in the mirror,
we beat the N3 south through lofty, tumbled veld,
our line of cars on summer flight to old Natal.
Morning mine dumps dipped in gold and
spaghetti roads that feed the emporia of Edgars,
Jack’s Paint, Pick n Pay and wondrous Woolies,
then green lands stretched unending to
a Dragon Mountain grail at heaven’s door.
How now: brown cows, shaggy eucalyptus and
pylon soldiers marched through mealie fields
with neck-tether lines like slaves for coastal trade.
John Deere’s green-and-yellow tractors peel back
the soil in dark grooves of corduroy and long-tailed
ballroom wydahs dance their feather-boa flight.
We ford the olive Vaal, splice the muddy Wilge,
cleave through lands of grass and fields of sunflower.
There’s grimness, too: in Sanral’s tolling plazas –
a 40 ront here, a 55 there, to the sour ladies in blue;
the veld showing its ugliness in power stations
and grain-silo battery packs that leach the land;
windmills that twirl like fans to cool the crops,
foursquare they stand and mournfully clank
a dusty, waterless refrain.
Long-haired willows burred with nests,
single poplars middle-fingering the road
and red-bishop tracers fired from fence poles
along the Hol River, hollow and wholly dry.
Then a 1-Stop Nirvana for man and car alike
with Engen’s liquid victuals for our beasts.
A Wimpy haven offers on a plate
all-day brekky and ham sammidges,
semi-erect chips, psychedelic eggs
and the shaken-milk of chocolate
to fill the tummies of our happy band.
Outside, the jam-packed parking lot presents
a caravanserai of coloured cheer as all Gauteng
pours coastwise to Arcadian Toti, Utopian Margate.
West we veer past Harrismith to viridian hills where
civilisation thins and nature thickens on a narrow
road that winds up a creek to the Cavern for a week
of family time in the Berg’s basaltic embrace.
Chalets under duvet thatch with terraces, lawns
for croquet and cricket, badminton and bowls,
the staff all olde-school Zulu of the docile smile,
songs at dinner and ever longsuffering the children.
Our meals are communal and punctual, the teas high
on cucumber sandwiches and bottomless Five Roses,
the evenings filled with wine of the cellar,
meals that could be Middle England ’55
with post-prandial games of pool and beetle drive,
frog derby and beat-down-the-door-popular Bingo:
tickety boo, 62, bang on the drum, 71,
knock at the door for a number four,
and ever a sprightly 31, get up and run, run …
Run back into the hills each shining day, a line
of lads, all jabber and sticks and boundlessness,
us middlings and pensioners puffing up the rear,
we hike through forests meshed with fern and
trilled by robin-chat, white of eye, mountain wagtail
and, on the thermals gliding, a regal bearded vulture.
Midst flowers of Impatiens and Begonia stand tall
the forest giants of coffee pear, Cape ash and
the biggest cabbage tree you ever did see.
Up the grassy slopes decked with protea
where drunk-as-a-skunk sun and sugar fowl
sip nectar from a million sex-crazed blooms and
baboons bark their bossy baritones across a gorge,
proclaiming this rock, that crag, a divine-right home.
Beside a piano tinkling stream lie strewn the carcasses
of crab left-overs from the luncheon excesses
of water mongoose and clued-up, clawless otter.
It’s New Year’s Eve – all twenties themed,
with guests dressed to the nines and fine to dine
in flapper dresses, boater hats and bow ties,
the Charleston warbling across a lawn
where Pimms, Buck’s Fizz and ginger punch
go down by prodigious pint as warrior staff
dance high kicks to the white, white host
and honey the humid air with ululating song.
Dinner is served with crackers, paper hats,
Yorkshire pudding and spotted dick;
then dancing in the hall till, at the stroke of 12,
we muster on the glistening grass
to fill the dark with
Auld Lang Syne.
We, too, have run about the slopes,
and picked the proteas fine,
and wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.
And in that hymn to good times past,
the threat of bad to come,
that wipes away an Englishness
that’s hapless in the face
of Brics without mortar,
China without restraint
and leaders drunk on larceny.
We hike the sugared loaf all dressed in green
atop a wall of ochre stone laid down
when this blest land was still Gondwana.
Now blue-bruised clouds come sloping in
as lightning jabs the cliffs, cannons rumble
through the kloofs and rain tattoos the ground.
We shelter in a cannibal cave,
where once the starving Zizi ate their own
on the long, long nights
of Shaka’s short spears.
We wait, struck dumb by savage noise,
the grisly sound of stone on bone,
the non-negotiable vibration
of sky and berg at odds and ending
in the hiss of rain’s vain leavening.
At last the sun, again, in ether sheets
as if some sepia’d posting card.
But suddenly,
a lifted foot,
a halted heart!
Slick tartan leaf morphs to diamond head,
a thickening adder puffed and poised
to uphold this mountain’s older law,
where colonial dreams and Zulu chiefs,
summer hols and one man’s fears,
are but a beat in time.
– Justin Fox
In the next few days, write a poem that tries to transport your readers, taking them somewhere they have probably never travelled before. This does not have to be a place that can be found on a map. An inner landscape is also a valid destination.
- The 2026 AVBOB Poetry Competition opens for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit the AVBOB Poetry website today and read prize-winning poems from previous years as you prepare to find your own best words.
♦ VWB ♦
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