Dissolution and Reclamation: Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ by John Mateer

John Mateer is a poet with a peripatetic sense of self who is fascinated by cross-cultural historical currents and transformations. Conscious in his writing of his origins as a South African, connected to the Portuguese through his powerful interest in their history and art and their significant presence in South African history, and intrigued by, yet unable to fully identify with, the colonial enterprises of European nations over recent centuries, his poems frequently register how history and its associated human ambitions and cruelties taint or inflect much that we know