Linked to the realities of exile and of Africa, [the poems in Feu froid] are stimulated by sources as divergent as Senghor and Lorca and Neruda, the meditations of St. John of the Cross and the strident songs of Black Consciousness; above all, by Breyten Breytenbach 1939– Courtesy of Persea Books, Inc.the poet's long immersion in Buddhism, both Tantric and Zen. It is a poetry of paradoxes, resolving the tensions between birth and death, growth and decay, Africa and Europe, love and terror, tenderness and destruction.

Feu froid (which, in the original Afrikaans, signifies both "gangrene" and "cold fire") offers a glimpse of both the variety and the unity of Breytenbach's work: ranging from the tantric meditations of the volume Lotus (in which the act of love and the act of creating poetry mingle, mirroring one another, to reflect the interaction between man and world, heaven and earth...