Breytenbach's passionate desire to know and serve the truth, whatever it may be and whoever it may offend, is deeply admirable.

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.

No white South African writer has penetrated as deeply into his own country as Breytenbach—and none has been as successful in the flowering of his art in exile.

[Return to Paradise] is written with a wild heart and an unrelenting eye, and is fueled by the sort of rage that produces great literature.

Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of his generation . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.