Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006 - Softcover

J. M. Coetzee has described Breyten Breytenbach as "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." Windcatcher is a collection of Breytenbach's best work in poetry from 1964 to 2006, and includes many poems never before published. There are poems here from Paris in the sixties; poems written in prison, when Breytenbach was jailed in South Africa for seven years for his activities against the apartheid regime; poems of exile from New York in the nineties; poems from Vancouver, from Amsterdam, from Dar es-Salaam. Windcatcher is a remarkable record of a remarkable life and imagination. it is when night is at its deepestjust before morning that the muezzin calls the faithfulfor they are still asleepand his sad cry drifts over index fingers of minaretsrooftops and lovers and flowers and dockshis sad cry dawns over city

—from "Dar es-Salaam: Harbor of Peace"

Windcatcher is a collection of Breytenbach's poetry from 1964 to 2006, and includes many poems never before published. There are poems here from Paris in the sixties; poems written in prison, when Breytenbach was jailed in South Africa for seven years for his activities against the apartheid regime; poems of exile from New York in the nineties; poems from Vancouver, from Amsterdam, from Dar es Salaam. Windcatcher is a remarkable record of a remarkable life and imagination. PRAISE FOR WINDCATCHER

“These poems explore, over the course of more than forty years, a life devoted to individual conscience in the context of Breytenbach's native South Africa and of our troubled age, and to poetry and the relation between them. Altogether they comprise a daring and original testament unlike any other I know, one that is haunting, passionate, uncompromising, attuned to the sufferings and evanescent beauties of the present.”--W. S. Merwin

"Quietly and insistently political, Breyten Breytenbach's Windcatcher embraces a tough-minded hope that can only reside in love. In these poems that dare to witness, even when the language transports us to the edge of an otherworldly dimension, this wonderful poet knows how to keep us here in this world, in this time, where the personal and universal merge in a tangible singing of woe and joy." --Yusef Komunyakaa

|Windcatcher is a collection of Breytenbach's poetry from 1964 to 2006, and includes many poems never before published. There are poems here from Paris in the sixties; poems written in prison, when Breytenbach was jailed in South Africa for seven years for his activities against the apartheid regime; poems of exile from New York in the nineties; poems from Vancouver, from Amsterdam, from Dar es Salaam. Windcatcher is a remarkable record of a remarkable life and imagination. PRAISE FOR WINDCATCHER

“These poems explore, over the course of more than forty years, a life devoted to individual conscience in the context of Breytenbach's native South Africa and of our troubled age, and to poetry and the relation between them. Altogether they comprise a daring and original testament unlike any other I know, one that is haunting, passionate, uncompromising, attuned to the sufferings and evanescent beauties of the present.”--W. S. Merwin

"Quietly and insistently political, Breyten Breytenbach's Windcatcher embraces a tough-minded hope that can only reside in love. In these poems that dare to witness, even when the language transports us to the edge of an otherworldly dimension, this wonderful poet knows how to keep us here in this world, in this time, where the personal and universal merge in a tangible singing of woe and joy." --Yusef Komunyakaa