Onthou is die dag wat breek

Lina Spies is one of the most celebrated and beloved Afrikaans poets, with a rich body of iconic poems such as “On the Death of Riëtte”, “A Paternoster for South Africa”, “Song of the Children” and “Rembrandt”.

We are convinced that the most fitting tribute is one paid through the poetry of fellow poets.

The title of the collection is derived from a line in one of Spies’s poems, namely “Kringloop” (included in Sulamiet, 2016), and points to the merging of remembrance and continuation. Each of the fifty-four poems included in the collection contains points of connection.

Some poems enter into a clearly identifiable dialogue with specific poems by Spies. In addition to these direct engagements, other poems connect in a more subtle and broadly defined way with thematic codes in Spies’s repertoire, such as children, cats, artistic creation and death.

We hope that this tribute collection will encourage poetry readers to explore the poetry of Lina Spies with renewed interest and to reflect on her enduring impact on Afrikaans poetry.

Alwyn Roux and Neil Cochrane are affiliated with the Department of Afrikaans and General Literary Studies at Unisa. They are the editors of Merang (2025), a collection of 182 new Afrikaans poems. Roux’s debut collection, Weerskyn (2024), was shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Prize.