the girl who then feared to sleep & other poems
angifi dladla    
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Alan Finlay, The Sunday Independent, 30 September 2001:
Angifi Dladla’s poetry has a raw ... dislocated feel to it. Its movement is often surreal, yet its meaning focussed. The girl who then feared to sleep, his first book of poems, is a good example of how poetry can respond to a violent and violated society. [It] offers no easy solutions. It does what poetry is good at doing. It shows those things right beneath our noses ... we are perhaps afraid to see.

Greg Penfold, The Cape Times, 14 January 2002
... a poet with a sober, practical demonstration of his ability to thrill, terrify or exalt his reader … Anecdotes of cruelty and exploitation, madness, drunkenness, sexual frenzy and random violence are fleshed out with a chilling surreal clarity. Myths are fished up for the first time, as if out of nowhere: the blackgold, symbol of all that has been neglected in this continent; whiteness, the tendency toward monomaniacal despotism, the nightmare of pure reason; the reversibility of white and black, black and white.

Phaswane Mpe, New Coin, December 2001
... an excellent, wide-ranging contribution to South Africa poetry in style, tone and themes … full of pain, love, compassion and hope.

Pam Marshall, Wordstock, 3 July 2001
... there is a sense of experimental freshness and raw power that breathes in these poems.

Mxolisi Nyezwa, Kotaz, 2001 Vol 3. No. 1
Angifi speaks in many voices [his] originality brings forth new, powerful images ... a great storyteller ... a seasoned chronicler.