Sydney Clouts is likely always to hold a peculiar place in South African literary history, if only because the relatively few poems he left at his death in 1982 are variously read as some of the most original and some of the most obscure ever to have emerged from the country. The slim volume Sydney Clouts: Collected Poems (1984), edited by his wife and brother after his death, is evidence of a rigorously self-critical mind whose primary poetic interests are in Being, both human and inanimate; the relationship between humanity and nature; and poetry 's role in that relationship. This largely Romantic program has led to both high acclaim and severe criticism. The acclaim has focused on the skill that Clouts reveals in the creation of unusual, often startling imagery and ideas, and a linguistic tightness and experimentation that had hitherto not been seen in South African poetry. The criticism...