You find the poems hovering uneasily between trying to be public poems and at the same time to be private poems. I am thinking especially of Eddison Zvobgo's poems and some of Musa Zimunya's. I myself have chosen the private voice even when I am dealing with a public theme, simply my own idiosyncratic, irrelevant perhaps anarchistic vision. I see the invisible poet opposed to the visible poet. The vacuum he leaves behind should act as an explosion on the sensibility, the mind and the imagination.
Poetry means to reconstruct the world in one's head every morning again.
Okot p'Bitek, Nortje and Mungoshi demonstrate that in their poems. We still don't have a poetry which expresses extreme lassitude and violence at the same time as, for instance, our sunsets. And we have still not developed a poetry which describes a landscape for its own sake. He is Sick. Although he died young and his output was regrettably small, the difference in his voice, in his concerns and in his attitude added something special and enduring to the body of African literature.