By highlighting and teasing out the mingled emotions of anxiety, disenchantment, hope and anger which characterise South Africans’ current experienced reality, Sole’s poetry questions and expands on our concerns about identity and belonging.

In so doing, the poems in Skin Rafts contemplate the relationships that exist between us on a number of seemingly discrete, but actually intertwined, fronts – the personal relationship between lovers; the wider social and political relationships between human beings; as well as the problematic and contested human relationships that are brought to bear on land, landscape and the non-human.

In this collection the reader is confronted with the circumstance that both body and society exist in a fragile dimension of uncertainty, where we all are ‘bobbing / on our raft of skin’.

Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Sole’s seventh collection of poetry. It extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships; the exposing of false and cliched perspectives in our socio-political life; our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape. Rustum Kozain has written about his work: “Whether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the reader’s complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity.”

Absent Tongues is Kelwyn Sole's sixth collection of poetry; a collection that speaks of tenderness, anger, ambivalence and fear. This is territory Kelwyn has long made his own - hymnal vignettes that thread the landscape of South Africa with patterns of myth and people, with pasts, presents, and, at times, with futures. We come away from these poems with something akin to nostalgia, something like a yearning to belong in the most fundamental sense - to be water, air, bone, sky. Kelwyn Sole writes with grace, acuity and with thoughtful philosophical purpose, affirming his position in the forefront of contemporary South African poetry.