Jeremy Cronin's poems collected in the single and singular volume Inside, the interviews he has granted in conjunction with the publication of this volume, and his critical essays on literary culture, mostly concerned with ideological configurations in black South African poetry of the 1970s, all in one way or another address the relation between public and private, rearticulating a tension common to recent South African literatures: the disparity, perhaps only an ostensible disparity, of demands for revolutionary struggle on the one hand and aspirations for a more private aesthetic on the other. Amid the poems in Inside, I shall argue, Cronin commonly achieves a surprisingly secure viewpoint for ideological critique. And no small part of the surprise in which this viewpoint is secured is that it should be secured here, inside a volume of poetry, rather than ‘outside’; rather, that is to say, than in the critical essays where Cronin directly addresses the issue of ideology, or rather than in what for him must be the political domain of that public performance for which some of the poems are expressly composed. Cronin's ideological critique, I shall further argue, derives its security from a less predictable event than the ruin of hegemonic order that the order and ordering of his poems frequently seek; the force of his critique will instead be linked in the end to the collapse of order in which these poems themselves come to participate.