‘A giant of local letters, Stephen Watson was anchored at the University of Cape Town. In his poetry, he was best known as a lyrical chronicler of the Cape’s natural beauty, documenting the response of the soul when surrounded by it. His intertwinedness with the landscape spilled into his prose too.’ (Acknowledgment: Book Southern Africa)
An excerpt fromThe Music in the Ice – On Writers, Writing  and Other Things, a collection of essays by Stephen Watson, on subjects as diverse as South African “black” poetry and Leonard Cohen.

‘’I saw (Leonard Cohen) once … at a concert out amidst the hills of the southern highlands of New South Wales … the audience that night had come from far afield … though there were several, like me, who had travelled a good deal further. They had come in sufficient numbers to remind one that if, as any criminologist might say, human beings will do almost anything for money or sex, they will also, in the end, go very far – perhaps still further – for the experience of beauty.

He came on stage at precisely 7.30pm, just as the sun set over the hills … opening with ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, he played all the old songs, including ‘Sisters of Mercy’, ‘Who by Fire’, ‘Suzanne’.
Not far from his seventy-fifth birthday, we were in the presence of someone who was already an old man. But there was no trace left of the smart but sometimes overly facetious, sententious youth he had once been. His years of Buddhist practice – that most radical of cures for the narcissistically inclined – had seen to that. In his bearing on stage there was that gaiety which is often the mark of a certain spiritual maturity.

When he moved, it was with the kind of assurance, the deep inner self-possession so evident in the songs themselves, particularly the later ones he also sang or recited that night – ‘In My Secret Life’, ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ – in which each word is placed with a kind of meditated deliberateness, its edges cleaned by the silence that his delivery would allow to eddy momentarily around each syllable.

Each of us had long had our own inner relation to the songs. We knew the words and thus heard them in haunting stereo: they came from within, from memory, even as they issued from the speakers flanking the stage.
As with all things known by heart, those songs had been a central plank in the education of our sentiments. As yet I knew nothing of that machining of the language that makes for a line of poetry.

Even later, when I first heard Cohen sing ‘Show me slowly what I only know the limits of’ (from ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’), the function of that internal rhyme – that audible but all but invisible web of sounds that, like the rigging that holds a yacht’s mast in place, adds echo to echo, binding the lyric to itself – was probably lost on me. I simply did not hear it.

Likewise that complex mediation of traditions – the Bible, the English ballad, and Yeats among them – that would make of Cohen’s best stanzas something at once very old and very new:
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.|
I was years away from understanding how the movement of a verse, its rhythm, could weave, apparently from thin air, an architecture which structures one’s inner world. (It was the double helix that defined Crick and Watson’s model of DNA that would later strike me as the nearest spatial equivalent of this effect.)
It is something which is, of course, central to the pleasure that the art of poetry offers. But by listening to Leonard Cohen, I was absorbing by aural osmosis, I like to think, something of this knowledge.

He was on stage for close on three hours. By the time he reached his fifth and last encore, he had given us something else besides.
He had given us, as certain artists do, a kind of courage: the courage to go back to one’s own tiny life, its importance, its irrelevance, its times of dearth, rare moments of completion, but above all its reality, its there-ness.
He had made of the bone of his heart (as a late poem would call it) a treasure and gifted it to us that night.

Nor had it been received in the conventional way. Unlike so many concerts, there had been no dancing in the aisles, standing on chairs, people singing along or swaying, drunk, lost in the autism of their own ecstasy.
The audience had listened in absolute silence … theirs was not only the silence that arises when people meet with something that arouses unusual devotion, even veneration. It was, rather, one which it had been the unique capacity of Leonard Cohen’s songs to instill for more than forty years.

It was the silence that takes possession of human lives – so, by this stage of the night, all of us had reason to believe – when we are suddenly returned, perhaps even in spite of our ourselves, to a space that is ordinarily forgotten, collapsed in on itself, otherwise non-existent: the place that is our longing.’’

Stephen Watson’s prose and poetry touched people deeply – he too ’had made of the bone of his heart … a treasure and gifted it to us’, and his passing leaves a profound void.

Writing in the Mail & Guardian, author David Medalie provides an extensive and appreciative obituary for poet and teacher Stephen Watson.

”In 2005 he edited A City Imagined, a collection of essays about Cape Town. The title is appropriate, because Cape Town was always, for him, a site of the imagination, not simply the city where he lived and worked. In the concluding piece, “Afterword to a City”, which Watson penned, he quoted Flannery O’Connor, who said: “If you are going to write, you’d better have somewhere to come from.”