oa De derde leeftijd in versvorm - Verweerskrif van Antjie Krog

The South-African writer and poet Antjie Krog (1952) became very well-known because of highly personal accounts of the political and social situation in her motherland. In her poetry Krog tends to be even more personal, with her lyrical subjects aging together with her, following her own lifeline. The female body is a recurring theme in her poetry. The collection of poetry Verweerskrif (2006, Body Bereft in English, Lijfkreet in Dutch) is her most intimate and provocative book so far. In these verses Krog gives an account of how it feels for a woman to grow old(er), and addresses the unpleasant and often silenced aspects of female aging. She invents a new and subversive vocabulary for the third age and as such removes taboos and myths surrounding the discourse of the elderly, more specifically, the older woman going through menopause.