The importance of elsewhere

John Mateer’s Elsewhere is a collection of poems from elsewhere – other small-press publications – and about elsewhere. The book is divided into three parts: ‘Azania’, which documents Mateer’s return to his homeland, South Africa; ‘Medan and Zipangu’, which contains poems inspired by travels in Asia; and ‘Americas’, which takes the United States and Mexico as its subjects. In ‘Uit Mantra’, one of the poems in the collection, Mateer describes the poet as ‘another name for emptiness’. As he traverses the various landscapes and cultures that inspire him, Mateer acts as a cipher for both the tangible particularities of experience – landscapes, history, people – as well as the unsayable and the unsaid – the repressed, metaphysical and hallucinatory.