Whatshot
Book Review: Fragments by Deborah Ewing
Book Review: Fragments by Deborah Ewing
Date: 2025-12-18
Durban-based writer and long-time advocate for children's rights, Deborah Ewing, steps into the world of published poetry with her debut book, Fragments - a collection as gentle as it is quietly piercing. Though she has written extensively across fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and child-justice programming, this is her first book of poetry, and it arrives with the calm assurance of someone who has spent a lifetime paying attention.
Ewing describes Fragments as "a meditation, in verse and image, on the spaces between people, places, and the natural world." She gathered these pieces during the Covid lockdown, writing her way through distance and disconnection. "I gathered together these fragments as a way to journey through the grief and isolation of the Covid lockdown toward reconnection," she explains - and that intention holds the book together like soft stitching.
Many of the accompanying photographs capture the delicate, the fleeting, the easily overlooked. "I saw small details and fleeting scenes as symbols of how we are separated from and bound to each other around the world." The poems then rise naturally from this way of seeing - spare, thoughtful, quietly reaching. "The poems arose from my compulsion to bridge physical and emotional distances," she says, and the sincerity of that impulse is felt on every page.
For a writer who says poetry doesn't pay her bills - "I don't make a living writing poetry, it just keeps me functioning" - this debut feels astonishingly complete. Fragments is not a loud book; it is a tender one. A hand extended across the strange distances we have all walked. A reminder that even in fractured times, there is beauty waiting to be gathered, held, and shared.
"I'd like to offer a special to your readers - R130 reduced from R150 for December / Jan - people can WhatsApp Fragments and their name to 083 294 5031 for the discount." Concluded Deborah.