Bloodsong: Poems by Leon de Kock

Leon de Kock's grain of sand is family life, and in it we see, expanding out of Gauteng, and then greater South Africa, a world in which the pains of existence are celebrated with deep feeling and high intelligence. At a time when so much poetry one reads in the magazines is timorous, self-deconstructing, clever without the necessary skills that make clever poetry worth reading, and relieved to shrug off the burden of apartheid as if it were no more than a prickly T-shirt - at a time like this, it is most welcome to come across poetry that breathes and bleeds in response to the continuing struggle to understand this violent and beautiful.country. Leon de Kock's poems are rooted in the land which malnourished him.