These jewels
stones of the earth

smell ever more of home in exile
from imagined homes,

where a sea slaps a city
and aqueducts across the veld scandalising the baobabs

However it is not enough that somewhere else everything is possible.
    from 'These jewels'
   

In The Book of Stones Adam's Schwartzman explores what it means to live in the new South Africa, to be part of historical processes while sustaining an individual life. The poet returned home in 1999 to live and work in the country he had mythologised and idealised. The poems in this book, written in Uganda, Eritrea, Nigeria and Mali, as well as in South Africa itself, are full of the impact of those experiences. Four groups of poems develop understanding of commitments to love and politics, and to finding a way to remain engaged with history and survive. Above all, the poems evoke with sensuous immediacy the physical and emotional landscapes of Africa.