The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995, edited by Leon de Kock and Ian Tromp

The Heart in Exile is an important new collection of South African poetry which will have wide appeal. Its unique relevance derives partly from the fact that it is positioned squarely in the transition years of 1990-1995, when the country literally changed its face.

But the collection also signals a new suppleness in South African English poetry. Although poets have continued, in these years, to register a sense of their own exile - and that of their fellow South Africans - from a kinder and more benevolent land in which to live, their passionate involvement with the country, its land and its people, has found a new sense of receptivity: a greater community of shared feeling in the wake of South Africa's transition.

Old orthodoxies, spites and rivalries have begun to evaporate, and poets have felt freer to enter into this sense of homecoming as a re-engagement with human feeling in a broader range of styles, registers and forms. This diversity has been captured in this marvellously heterogeneous book of poems.

The poets chosen, both newer and more established writers always searingly engaged in the search for a better sense of South A as a home, whether this is conceived as a space in which to discover more nuanced textures of experience and feeling, or as the physical home from which so many South Africans have felt alienated, despite their continued presence in the country.

The Heart in Exile is a collection which will redefine our conception of poetry in a new South Africa.