During the 1970s and '80s, Breytenbach's work in Afrikaans placed him among South Africa's best-known poets; his imprisonment by the apartheid regime (recounted in his 1985 memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist) helped make him a minor international celebrity. Though Breytenbach now lives in Paris and New York City, his thoughts and emotions remain close to his homeland; here, vividly sensual love poems to Breytenbach's wife commingle, in the poet's own English, with evocations of southern Africa and of struggles around the world. Sometimes, as with "dreams are wounds as well," all three topics inhabit a single poem: "I remain a bed marshal," Breytenbach writes there, "evacuating my armies at night." Image-rich free-verse catalogues share space with dream- or folktale-like stories, at their best (as in "the request" or "poem on toilet paper") combining love with political rage. (Other poems visit East Asia and Morocco, or explore the epigrammatic couplet.) Breytenbach's immediacy owes something to his world travels and something to Pablo Neruda, who also combined surreal images with leftist politics: "give me that love/ which never rots between fingers," Breytenbach asks, and (in another poem), "If you get satisfaction from the ink of days,/ of what will you then continue to doubt?" As with some of Joseph Brodsky's poems in English—and more drastically here than there—readers may find Breytenbach's phrases clumsily assembled, or unidiomatic; no one, however, will doubt the passion behind them. (Apr.)
