"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Brown, in the final sentence, points to a search for political connections. More telling,
I think, is the work’s portrayal of the lack of ecological connections between man and
nature. The point is that Livingstone depicts the lack of connections because (on the
whole) they do not exist. It is hard to accept this harsh reality. As a reader, one does not
want to see this bleak view and this is, in part, what makes the collection difficult to
stomach. Reg Rumney alludes to this difficulty and admits defeat: “At its heart the
collection is an attempt to refine a philosophical stance which can’t easily be distilled out
of the verse itself. (I’m not going to try).”
Rumney does point out that A Littoral Zone differs from Livingstone’s previous
work “because of its genesis in the quarrelsome tryst of art and science”. He expands this
idea: “Livingstone has said that science is humanity’s search for truth and art man’s
interpretation of that truth, and that the two disciplines both aid and hamper each other.
What’s lacking from science is imagination, he had noted, the moving force of poetry”.
Basil du Toit’s review is a mixture of praise and censure which elides the
ecological message in the collection. For example, he calls Livingstone’s style “demotic”
or, more fully, “a concern with a modern-sounding, informal, even rough or slangy
language” (49) and claims that the most important poems of A Littoral Zone fall within
the “demotic group”. When this fails, he dismissively argues, there is “a lack-lustre
quality in the verse” (49). Klopper has, in places, a more ecologically-informed
interpretation. He notes that nature can offer Livingstone “sacred moments of mutuality
between man and beast, as in the poem ‘A Visitor at Station 21’” (47).
The reviews by Morphet and Sacks are the most substantial and will be referred to
in greater detail in the next two chapters. Tony Morphet’s highly technical and articulate
article examines Livingstone’s use of language: “My plan is to … begin by considering
the ‘one long poem’ as building the grammar of a single complex representational field”
(205). Morphet summarises:
To return to the perspective of the ‘one long poem’, the case that I have tried to
make thus far is that it builds a linguistic lattice which interlinks the culture of
human exchange with the fundamentals of biological structure and process.
Consciousness finds its link with biological process in their common point of
origin in the sea. (208)
On Livingstone’s engagement with language, Morphet argues: “I take the central
dynamic of the poems to be the fact that the long evolutionary perspective both increases