The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry, 1960-1996, edited by Denis Hirson

The lava of change has spilled over South Africa again as apartheid has ended. What sort of social and artistic emerges as it cools? This anthology, containing more than two hundred poems by over fifty poets, spans five distinct historical periods in the contemporary development of South Africa, from the worker strikes in Durban in the 1960s to the dismantling of apartheid apparatus in the 1990s. The poems, chosen for their music, their imagery, and their sense of language and craft, reveal not only an intense awareness of conditions during the apartheid years, but also reflect the extremes of turbulence and doubt that have followed in the wake of its dissolution.

Most of the poems have been written in English; forty-eight of the poems have been translated: from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and /Xam, a Bushman linguistic group. Inspired by music, by the language of the streets, by the sensual and the erotic, and by social, political, and economic turmoil, these poems showcase a remarkable complexity of literary traditions.They provide a fascinating and moving rendering of South Africa’s hybrid landscape, and a unique and recognizably African worldview.