Native to South Africa, Paul and Margaret met in
Cape Town, while studying at the University of Cape Town, marrying in 1964. The country and its people figure frequently in the poems.

Apartheid days, with its obsession for racial purity show in Isolation; Banned recognises the banning orders placed on some writers during those days;
A Dagga Smoker’s Prayer includes the phenomenon
of ‘code-switching’, drawing on South Africa’s many languages; leadership of The Salvation Army in Southern Africa brought responsibility to cultivate harmony, highlighted in Reconciliation.

Love of the country’s natural beauty, the veld, the mountains and South Africa’s coastline all come out as in Freedom in the Drakensberg and The Contour Path. But a certain wistfulness about South Africa creeps in as crime and the HIV epidemic cloud the horizon in Another Paradise Lost.