Love poems [and poems about politics each] comprise about half the work in the two new translations of the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach [and death white as words and In Africa Even The Flies Are Happy]…. The same quality of imagination is present in each half but it is in the political poems that this finds its most significant (and pressingly needed) vision…. [The] political poems bear a witness we must hear as political evidence and not deflect back into our sense of his work as a whole.

As a love poet Breytenbach writes with a daring extravagance of imagination which recalls the early Neruda. There is wit and tender pathos but these are held within a sustained rhetorical sweep, a cumulative mixing of metaphors, which convey the imagination's endeavour to keep up with the riches and force of the body's discoveries. For it is in bodily responses...