Recognized as an important South African poet, with poems included in several anthologies of South African verse, Arthur Nortje achieved this status partly by the poignant eloquence and technical skill of his best pieces and partly through his representative articulation of the condition of exile from South Africa. He achieved much in a poetic career that lasted barely ten years and his brilliance and promise are widely acknowledged, although his tendency toward verbosity, flamboyance, and sometimes self-indulgent obscurity is noted by most commentators. Only two Nortje verse collections have been published, both posthumously: Dead Roots: Poems (1973) and Lonely Against the Light: Poems (1973). Since he died, probably by suicide, at so young an age (not yet twenty-eight) and since the melancholia from which he suffered is usually expressed in terms reflecting the racist sociopolitical system, Nortje's work is almost unavoidably read as the testimony of a martyr to apartheid...