In the Country of the Black Pig, by Christopher Hope (Used)

About Christopher Hope's earlier volume of poems Cape Drives the T.L.S. wrote: 'Their verbal burliness is controlled by a taut emotional discipline which allows for moments of metaphorical brio or clinching wit, heightening without overcolouring their tenacious social realism... their emotional tight-lippedness is not to be mistaken for neutrality, but seems rather the necessary stringency of a poet who needs to feel his way back into an increasingly alien world by a process of precise observation, clarifying and defining its textures so that perception itself becomes a kind of moral act.'

Many of the poems in this new book have, like those in its predecessor, South African subjects; even those that do not are often tinged by the experience of having seen racialism close up. The main difference from Cape Drives, though, is that all these new poems were written in England. Their themes correspondingly vary, but in all of them there is evidence of the terse wit and social awareness that distinguish all Christopher Hope's writing.

Condition: very good