The power of history to shape people and politics is explored in this collection of finely wrought poems. The desire to find ancestors who can be invoked as sources of wisdom, or remembered as examples of imprudence, is a central preoccupation of these poems that are given additional potency because of South Africa's painful dialogue with its own past. While the poems dwell on South Africa's need to recover and learn from its history, they are also an affirmation of the universality of this theme that places South Africa within a global culture in which countries and their citizens struggle to forge whole identities from the fragments of history they inherit.