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

"Quiet and disquiet", The Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 1985, p. 527 The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive,, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EX1200447360/GDCS?u=linc74325&sid=GDCS&xid=34e39750. Accessed 06 Jul 2019

Dennis Walder discusses three African poets in his review "Quiet and disquiet." He compares and contrasts the work of Patrick Cullinan, Douglas Livingstone, and Oswald Mtshali. Walder suggests that Cullinan "sidesteps the factional rhetoric of his native land, preferring subtelty, irony, and indirection," while Livingstone is a "confident meditation on the vicissitudes of desire," though it is detached and lacking "point." Walder points to Oswald Mtsali's collection Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971) for "urgent voices" on the urban black experience, though he is critical of Mtshali's latest work, Fireflames, which he sees as "abandon[ing] the quieter, ironic mode of his earlier work for rhetorical expostulation" that "lie inert on the page."