The landscape of Afrikaans poetry, originally marked only by whites, soon expands to encompass brown and black voices as well. They overwhelm the reader with nostalgia or prophetic inspiration, with sonnets and haikus and odes and crosswords and lullabies and hardboiled realism, with the erotic and the sardonic, with blasphemy and sly or iconoclastic humour, with explorations of dreams and memories, hopes and terrors, with landscapes of fear or serenity or guilt or innocence, intimations of mortality and immortality, of the most fleeting and the most lasting or pervasive, with rage and revolt, with resignation or quietly burning faith, preoccupations with Europe and the Far East and the Americas and, always, always, with Africa, its crudeness and relentlessness, its generosity and magnanimity and cruelty and terrors, its primordial past and imagined future, its magic and its unforgiving actuality its patterns and rhythms and surprises. There are evocations of purity and of sexual excess, of forgiveness or blame, of femininity and masculinity, of childhood and the unforgiving approaches of old age and death.