“Sole’s poetry constitutes “a body of work that has constantly questioned, fretted about, celebrated, eulogised, discovered, re-discovered, and charted, among many other things, a South Africanness in all its contradictions, solidarities, tragedies, absurdities and sometime normalities. ……… Sole has a clearly ravenous curiosity and a catholic eye that refuses to compartmentalise the world. Some of his poems can teem with a novelistic life-characters, linguistic registers, a detailed environment, the sounds of a city in the background-that makes a mockery of any easy categorisation into, say, political or love poems. A ‘political’ poem is never only, narrowly, one-dimensionally, about politics-they are never screeds, in other words.”
