Group areas, with particular reference to the Western Cape Book

A collection of Breytenbach's essays from before his journey through prison, headed by the title "Blind Bird," and from after his prison stint, headed by "Burnt Bird," these are great snapshots in essay form of Breytenbach's fiery career: a restless critic, a stridently antiapartheid voice, a poetic innovator, a thoughtful & passionate writer. Across the span of the collection they also help illustrate his self-acknowledged transformation from sightless to scorched or, in other words, from an idealist and humanist writer earnestly taking on the troubles of his world to a more embittered, wary voice paradoxically more open to humanism, if a humanism of a different kind.
Life is not entirely correct or tender in its treatment of the human. Put another way: characteristic of the human condition is that you are a broken rhythm, that time catches up with you, that you quite simply develop too tardily to be able to digest effectively the dollops of 'liberated' wisdom you may have managed to imbibe through a tight gullet. / Everywhere around you, like tiny unscripted fables, you become aware of the paradoxes and the ironies of the matter...
Not yet at the sophistication and organic development of prose found in the later Intimate Stranger, this is nevertheless a good vision of the poet's developing prose style and poetics.