John Mateer’s Elsewhere is a poetry collection about displacement, memory, South Africa, Australia, travel, colonial residue, language and violence.

The contents point toward South African place and history — Azania, Johannesburg, Valkenburg, Devil’s Peak, the Highveld — but also toward the instability of elsewhere itself: the way exile, migration, family memory, and political inheritance make every location feel haunted by another one.

Mateer’s poems have a spare, alert, image-driven quality: streetkids, graveyards, mothers, mountains, alchemists, video messages, cities, birds, fragments of speech, and landscapes that seem to carry historical charge under the surface. This is good for readers of contemporary poetry, South African/Australian literary crossings, postcolonial poetics, memory work, place-writing, and small-press poetry that doesn’t behave like decorative feeling. A quiet but serious one.

First edition paperback published by Salt Publishing in 2007. ISBN 9781844712755. Good second-hand condition, with light handling and shelfwear. Internally clean.