These essays are interventions in a cultural contestation in South Africa during the Seventies and Eighties. Some of them are more general in nature and were written in the first instance as public oral interventions in debates whose outcome contributed to the founding of South Africa's post-apartheid society. Other essays are more specifically aimed at poetic practices, particularly as these have been of crucial aesthetic and ultimately ethical importance in a critical phase of South Africa's painful development. Intimate knowledge of (and personal involvement in) the commitment of literature to concrete political situations informs these succinct and spirited essays, along with Horn's measured familiarity with European traditions of political, cultural and ideological thought. The topics covered include: the social context of South African poetry; poetry and apartheid; the praise-singing tradition and the liberation struggle; German documentary theatre and South African workers' theatre; the necessity of popular culture; post-Freudian readings and feminist aesthetics; censorship and society; and essays on individual South African poets (Jeremy Cronin; Wopko Jensma; Abduraghiem Johnstone; Mzwakhe Mbuli; Mongane Serote; Ari Sitas).