[One of the first reviews of Brutus's A Simple Lust appeared under the title “Lust without Passion” in the African Communist, No. 55, 4th quarter, 1973. It was written by someone identified simply as GALA. According to Roger Field, Alex la Guma: A Literary & Political Biography (James Currey, 2010, p. 236), this was a pseudonym used by Alex la Guma in articles he wrote for the African Communist. Here is the entire review.]

Heinemann Books in London recently published a collection of poems by the South African poet Dennis Brutus. The collection includes his earlier works, namely Sirens Knuckles Boots, Letters to Martha, Poems from Algiers, Thoughts Abroad. All these and others are now published under the title “A Simple Lust.”

A victim of apartheid oppression and police persecution, one who served a sentence on the notorious Robben Island, Dennis Brutus has also been active in the campaign to isolate South Africa from world sport and in campaigns for the release of political prisoners. The reader of these “poems of South African jail and exile” would therefore look forward to an experience of poetry rooted in the realities of South African life and the poet's identification with his country and his people's experiences, inside jail and out. But the reader with this expectation is disappointed, for Brutus seems to be concerned only with his own personal relationships and reactions to the world about him. “A troubadour, I traverse all my land/exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest…”