Dennis Brutus (1924–2009)

A broad collection of Dennis Brutus’s poems from his early days up to the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on his experience of imprisonment on Robben Island and his later life as an exiled anti-apartheid activist.
Fifty years on, the formality and elegance of Brutus’s poetic diction — smooth iambic pentameter lines, a tendency to steer away from simple Anglo-Saxon words — might seem to sit strangely with the rawness of the subject-matter, but it doesn’t take anything away from the show more anger and pain he is expressing here, or his compassion for his fellow prisoners. It’s interesting that he doesn’t turn the poems into political speeches. There is only one place where he even mentions his particular campaign to keep apartheid South Africa out of international sports. He clearly wants to keep poetry as a place for expressing human feelings, free from the abstractions of policy. Most powerful are the sequences “Letters to Martha” and “On the Island”, but there is gold everywhere you look in this book, really. show less

Brutus was a remarkable person, activist and poet. This anthology is a remarkable tome.