Guy Butler (ed) A Book of South African Verse (OUP, UK); Jack Cope and Uys Krige (eds) The Penguin Book of South African Verse (Penguin, UK). Early anthologies that, for better or for worse, "mapped" South African poetry. Butler's comment in his introduction - "Most of our poets have tried to belong to Africa and, finding her savage, shallow and uncooperative, have been forced to give their allegiance, not to any other country, but to certain basic conceptions" (read Europe) - remains controversial.

 

Roy Campbell   Selected Poems (OUP, UK). Very much a figure from a period of South Africa's literary colonialism, Roy Campbell, despite his sometimes politically repellent views, remains a major figure, and one of the most lyrically gifted and satirically sharp poets that South Africa has ever produced.

Tim Couzens and Essop Patel (eds)   Return of the Amasi Bird (Ravan, SA). Comprehensive collection of black South African poetry, which stretches right back to the early colonial era and extends to the cries of liberation and beyond.

Jeremy Cronin   Inside/Outside (David Philip, SA). Written by a leading member of the South African Communist Party, Inside , first published in 1983, is probably the most inventive work of South African prison poetry. Outside charts Cronin's reaction to post-apartheid South Africa, and continuing resistance to the many forms of betrayal of South Africa's larger populace.

Ingrid de Kok   Transfer (Snail Press, SA) Probably the most poetically intelligent of South Africa's feminist poets. Technically adroit, and always moving.

Peter Horn   The Rivers which Connect us to the Past (Mayibuye, SA). Horn was one of SA's most prolific protest poets during the 1970s, with strong socialist convictions.

Ingrid Jonker   Selected Poems (Human & Rousseau, SA). One of the few Afrikaans language poets whose English translation does justice to her work. The poems display a remarkable rawness in depicting the outrage of 1960s apartheid, as well as a grief-stricken lyricism from a poet who drowned herself in 1965 off Sea Point.

The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960-1996 (David Philip, SA). This most recent and comprehensive anthology of South African poetry includes work from the oral period, as well as translations from Afrikaans and other languages. The most useful introduction to date.

Mongane Wally Serote   Selected Poems (Ad Donker, SA). The leading light amongst South Africa's many protest poets, with a work that ranges from early rage to incantations of freedom, leavened with humour and startling imagery.

Stephen Watson   The Other City (David Philip, SA). No one better evokes Cape Town's changeable beauty, though Watson also writes of the heart and the great universal themes that make him a first-rate poet of the world, rather than just of his native city.