Rain across a paper field takes the reader through and beyond the woundedness of today's South Africa. True intuition and imagination reveal poems visionary, intimate, resonant and powerful. I looked in my heart black blood of history still not dry a sun trying to shine through solid cloud For the past decade, through his editorship of New Coin, Robert Berold has created and arena for the many different poetic voices in South Africa to flourish. Now he adds to his previous collections of poems, The Door to the River (1984) and The Fires of the Dead (1989), reminding us that his real vocation is that of the poet.