"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

44
closer affinity with nature and animals (and microbes?) than we suppose” and that “he
affirms a Darwinian view of things” (9). Maclennan, too, implicitly points to the
ecological undertow in the poet’s work but later asks where this would take humanity,
quoting from Livingstone’s poem “Scourings at Station 19” (LZ 47):
Yet if the world is a Darwinian place, what could possibly be the basis for
continued hope? … The heroic is romantic, as well as comic. The final image of
the poet is that of the battered bantam rooster on the beach, defying the world:
This teapot, whose rage is writ too large to be cooped
within one pygmy chanticleer, surveyed amazed
by gulls and gannets, trumpets his fractious challenge.
Tempting to dub the din thanksgiving; or more: life
triumphs even on no longer trusted plants. (10)
Maclennan uses “life / triumphs even on no longer trusted planets” as the title for his
tribute. The line summarises Livingstone’s hope for the Earth and his unlikely teapotshaped
rooster’s “fractious challenge” to the people who live carelessly on it.
Maureen Isaacson’s press obituary, “Courtly Gent and Sensual Poet, Douglas
Livingstone Remembered”, canvasses the opinions of South African literary figures.
Lionel Abrahams notes Livingstone’s “drivingly unselfish sense of duty and
responsibility to his art and his science”. His partner, Monica Fairall, calls him a
renaissance man and says he sought truth in science and that his poetry was an
interpretation of this. Tony Morphet recounts a conversation with Livingstone: “I said to
him: ‘I understand you’re a poet.’ He said: ‘No, I’m a scientist’”. But he was both, and
the journalist Nico Zaverdinos recalls Livingstone telling him that his poetry was his real
work: “My [scientific] doctorate is the soft core, A Littoral Zone is the hard core”.
Isaacson’s obituary also explores Livingstone’s refusal to write overtly ‘political’
poetry. Jeremy Cronin, a contemporary South African poet, said: “He was a marvellously
sensual lyrical poet in the tradition of Roy Campbell, unfortunately with the same politics
as Roy Campbell”. Cronin does not expand on this inaccuracy. (Campbell wrote a great
deal more politically-orientated satirical verse and lived a more politically active life than
Livingstone did.) Andries Oliphant, editor of Staffrider, conversely notes that
Livingstone’s decision to distance himself from political partisanship did not prevent him
from satirising certain political postures.
In another press obituary, “A Gap in our Horizon”, Stephen Gray quotes fellow
critic Christopher Hope who, in 1985, claimed that Livingstone was the “most widely