SOURCE: '"Turning Stones to Trees:' The Transformation Of Political Experience in Dennis Brutus' Strains," in Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus, edited by Craig W. McLuckie and Patrick J. Colbert, Three Continents Press, 1995, pp. 99-112.

In the following excerpt, Lent examines how the concrete landscape imagery in Strains embodies the abstract emotions of suffering and exile.

At the end of Strains, Dennis Brutus suggests this paradox regarding artistic expression and silence: "Music, at its highest / strains towards silence." (Strains, 44) In a curious way, it identifies an artistic issue that lies beneath the composition of the poems in this volume: how can a writer take the rather extreme human experiences represented in some of the poems—The Sharpeville massacre, the death of friends such as Teruggi and Nortje, memories of the poet's own imprisonment—and say anything worthwhile about them without the art being either too direct, or...