Award-winning heart to Anderson's new volume

Major voice: Peter Anderson's new anthology of poetry, Foundling's Island, part of the UCT Writers Series, was launched at the Irma Stern Museum last week.

Peter Andersons's new collection of poetry, Foundling's Island, is the latest in the UCT Writers Series. The core of the volume won the SANLAM Literary Award in 2003.

The UCT Writers Series is housed in the Centre for Creative Writing and has published some landmark volumes in recent years, Anderson says.

His volume is the first to be published jointly with Electric Book Works, a publisher with "deep ties" to UCT and UCT's undertakings in creative writing (two of its principals have creative writing degrees from UCT).

"The book's launch is thus also a celebration of a new and felicitous union in an area of marked accomplishment within the university."

Anderson says the book ("It should be on the bookshelves by now") comes at a time when the NRF is "at last looking at ways to encompass creative works within the project of new knowledge".

The work follows Anderson's Litany Bird (2000) and an edited anthology of South African love poetry called In the Country of the Heart.

Of Foundling's Island JM Coetzee has written: "In PR Anderson's stoic vision, our human need to keep things complex - to realise each moment in its full, unique vividness - is pitted against the relentless drive of the universe to simplify. Into the darkness at the far rim of consciousness the poet stubbornly probes in quest of the words that will incarnate our experience. Foundling's Island is an impressive new collection, the work of a thoughtful, assured poet."

Endorsement from Jeremy Cronin: "PR Anderson's new collection confirms a major voice - taut wit, tactile moment, and the voluptuous easing out into - as one poem has it - the common cause to keep 'abundant the abundant'."