Kelwyn Sole has made his mark in South Africa as a poet whose unrelenting protest against complacency is matched by a constant exploration of form. Here are poems which contemplate betrayal, baffled encounters and deluded love.

Kelwyn Sole's brilliant new collection is a volume of landscapes, voices and dreams, and a roving, meditative self. With a perfect ear and eye he captures an extraordinary array of scenarios, characters and places, where land, sea and sky are also an abiding presence. His modes shift from the filmic to the interior monologue, his tones from the wickedly satirical to the poignant, the raucously contentious to the intimate. In Sole's hands the prose poem becomes the perfect form. Full of arresting lines and images, its constellations create something that reads almost like a novel. It taps...

With a sense of history, the poems featured in this title urge our capacity to think and to feel and to act. The poems, sometimes angular and experimental, sometimes lyrical, challenge and illumine our sense of what it is to be in South Africa.

Absent Tongues is Kelwyn Soles sixth collection of poetry; a collection that speaks of tenderness, anger, ambivalence and fear. This is territory Kelwyn has long made his own - hymnal vignettes that thread the landscape of South Africa with patterns of myth and people, with pasts, presents, and, at times, with futures. We come away from these poems with something akin to nostalgia, something like a yearning to belong in the most fundamental sense - to be water, air, bone, sky. Kelwyn Sole writes with grace, acuity and with thoughtful philosophical purpose, affirming his position in the...