Intimate Stranger

Praise

In this inspiring, insightful and heart-warming meditation, Breyten Breytenbach has given us a masterpiece—a term I use with all due caution. He invites the reader into the process of poetry from vision to practice with a deep abiding humanity, genuine wisdom and compassionate good will spiced with humor. As unpretentious as a comfortable old shirt, this is a book to be read and reread, to be cherished by anyone who values the enlightenment found in great poetry of all kinds. —Sam Hamill

The greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as Breyten Breytenbach. —The New Yorker

As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life. —J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books