Breyten Breytenbach Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Barend J. Toerien

Critical Essay by Barend J. Toerien

The sensational background of the writing of these poems [Voetskrif]—the self-exiled poet's return to South Africa on a subsequently confessed subversive (and amateurishly bundled) mission and pre-trial imprisonment—is apt to prejudice the reader….

But poetry has a way of existing on its own terms and can gloriously soar above circumstance or its creator—as is manifest here or in the Pisan Cantos, to name another example. There is more than a circumstantial resemblance to Pound (to whom a canto is addressed): the versification is at times strikingly similar—the fractured sentences, the isolated images, the poem-endings in mid-sentence—but there is also the same urgent direct speech that retains a sonority and dignity, and alas, sometimes the trivia as well. Breyten also invokes some other poet bunglers who ran afoul of the system (Mandelstam, Villon, Lorca); and somehow one does not feel that he overreaches himself, for his self-inspection is dispassionate and sometimes...
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