In spite of—understandably—bitter renouncements of his people and country and the resultant switch to English for his prose works, Breyten Breytenbach, like many other exiled and transposed poets before him, seemingly finds it difficult to write poetry in a language other than his mother tongue. So we have in nege landskappe van ons tye bemaak aan 'n beminde (nine landscapes of our time dedicated to a loved one) a hefty volume containing a rich harvest of poems in Afrikaans and an exultant celebration of words and language.

Dedicated to the poet's Vietnamese wife, the collection is in nine sections (the Buddhist holy number of wholeness) and displays a richness of themes in a wealth, almost an extravagance, of words. There is a delight in language, as in the lines "to travel / through dictionaries and other scapes / where R's roll and stars jell and hisses / at times unexpectedly ripple like water over suffixes." The language is colloquial and would be hard to understand by nonspeakers of Afrikaans; Breytenbach's poetic mastery can therefore scarcely be appreciated internationally.

The poems are life-affirming, even though death is celebrated—death as the rich fulfillment of life—and are largely looser in construction than were the prison poems of the series The Undanced Dance—Voetskrif, Eklips, 'yk', Buffalo Bill, and Lewendood—probably because he then had more time on his hands. Not that the poems of nege landskappe are not sculpted or polished, but the forms are less obvious and have grown spontaneously, often enriched with unobtrusive rhyme patterns. There is also an astonishing exploration of the words themselves, revealing new and hidden meanings. The poetry has a strong visual element, often surrealistic and even bizarre, as also highlighted in the recent exhibition of Breytenbach's paintings in South Africa, works which showed an affinity with Max Ernst, Magritte, and Bruegel.

Throughout, the reader is made aware of Breytenbach's obsession with words and the act of writing poetry. There is a negative side to this, as some of the central sections seem prolix, especially when coupled with arguments that are none too easy to follow; but we are always conscious of the wholeness of the poet's vision. As one of his titles states, he "seeks refuge in words," as for instance: "chickens with rubber gloves sometimes / come to scratch after ants small like letters / that will strip all meaning / from dead words slavishly dragged into poetry"; or "to commit love together / was to climb up a tree / when first buds with eyes shut / start enticing the bees / and to chisel words / with shiny blind hands in a dark living room."

The second section or "landscape" deals with concrete actions on the poet's property in Catalonia, where he finds ease in a peaceful environment. Political poems of protest against injustices in South Africa form the third section; it fits in well with the book's overall wide and wise vision of oneness, a summing up through peaceful acceptance. The line "the true landscape is one of peace" occurs several times. Other "landscapes" deal with the concept of love, with space, with the past, immortality, time, and death. And always there is Breytenbach's amused and ironic stance, underlined by a quote from Mozart used as a colophon: "und dessentwegen / Je faisois un piccolo quodlibet."