Much of the latter part of [A Season in Paradise] reads like a Freudian prologue to the disaster that overtook Breytenbach well after it was written, when he went back to South Africa once again and landed in Pretoria Central Prison as a convicted "terrorist"….

In spite of [his] passion for human worth and equality, the poet is not very good at presenting people. The story of his reunion with his family turns into a rather blurred procession of characters with pet names or nicknames, instead of the central strand of "human" interest that it might have been.

It is when Breytenbach moves away from people to evoke the land, seas, vegetation, skies and especially stars of Africa that his writing in this book shows its true power. The splendid passage on Rimbaud, one feels, owes much of its effect to that poet's life in Africa, and even...