The poems of Mark Espin resonate with the spirit of Cape Town's "Cape Flats" – the wasteland to which apartheid banished Coloured people in the 1960s. Today these are thriving, transformed suburbs but still beset by high unemployment and gangsterism. However, Espin is not just a poet of Cape Town – he travels widely in world literature and is positively influenced by East European and South American poets. His style is both discursive and lyrical.