The publication of inward moon, outward sun signals a welcome end to Shabbir Banoobhai's self-imposed silence that lasted well over a decade. In the body of South African writing, his is a rare voice with the courage and the artistic skill to articulate a contemporary spirituality convincingly. The utmost simplicity of expression is used to conceal and reveal, at one and the same time, ideas of intense profundity. The poems are often meditative songs of love, longing and loss in a mystical world but they remain rooted in the social and political struggles of this world.

There are very few book-length sequences of poems and it excites me to encounter this form in the work of a well-known South African poet. To sustain a cycle of poem is to begin to dismantle the barriers between a novel or short story and poetry. In book of songs Shabbir Banoobhai takes a position that requires daring combined with humility - there is no rhetoric, no propaganda, but also no slinking away, no hiding in the suburbs of language, no shrinking from an encounter with mytery. A meditative cycle like this one reminds us opf out common thrist for love and meaning - John Metelerkamp. Written over a month of fasting and inspired by the poetry of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, these poems are all, ultimately, songs of love. When John Cleare, described as the outstanding British mountain photographer of the post-war era ("Penguin Encyclopaedia of Mountaineering"), generously agreed to contribute his photographs, these songs of love met their matching images of light and the book of songs finally became complete. It includes 40 captivating black and white photos by John Cleare.