A Survey of African Poetry in the London Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement 1865-1985

"A garbled message", The Times Literary Supplement, 18 May 1990, p. 533 The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive,, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EX1200460359/GDCS?u=linc74325&sid=GDCS&xid=7bea388b. Accessed 01 Jul 2019

Watson compares the two anthologies of African poetry, one compiled by Stephen Gray and the other Jane Watts. Of Penguin's anthology, he writes, "No work to date so completely misrepresents the full spectrum of poetry from this part of the world, and seems so perversely designed to mislead readers who do not already have extensive independent knowledge of local political and cultural history... Gray claims that all nations of southern African belong to a single 'literary system' whose importance overrides any division of the area into separate nation-states." Of Watts, Watson has a more positive opinion, in that Watts instead makes the "essential point" that the work of black writers in South Africa is "very different from that of African writers elsewhere." He then writes that, "having presented these differences, [Jane Watts] is able to explain with admirable lucidity why black writing in this country has progressively assumed an identity all its own, and most particularly why it no longer conforms to Western aesthetic standards."