Major accolade for Epic poem

City stanza: Prof Kelwyn Sole has won the 2011 Thomas Pringle Award for his poem, Cape Town^TM.

Cape Town^TM is no haiku.

Instead, this sweeping 1,700-word poem - for which UCT's Professor Kelwyn Sole has received the 2011 Thomas Pringle Award for poetry - soars from Table Mountain, to the city's suburbs and townships, to the ocean. And lest those sightseeing references and the trademark sign mislead, the poem is anything but a tourist brochure or a celebration of consumerism.

Instead, Sole, of UCT's Department of English Language and Literature, writes of tik houses and security walls and a city's residents lost in shopping malls, soccer stadiums, online shopping and cellular phones; with a dollop of self-reflection on a poet's toil.

The judges for the award, which is administered by the Academy of English of Southern Africa, hailed the "telling metaphors, the self-reflective and self-critical quality of the poem, and the combination of a sharp perception of place and nature with precise social criticism".

"Cape Town^TM," they said, "elegantly explores the shifting combination of delight and aversion, complicity and ethical distance that places ongoing pressure on identities in modern South Africa."

Cape Town^TM, first published in the journal New Contrast in 2010, marks Sole's third accolade from the Academy. In 1989 he won its Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry as a "new or emergent talent" with his first collection, The Blood of Our Silence. He also picked up the Thomas Pringle Award for Literary Criticism in 1998.