‘Though he disclaimed that his “Dark Folk” poems (1935) were “translations or imitations of native verse”, Slater managed to capture something of the feel and idiom of traditional Xhosa song, as in the lovely “Lament for a Dead Cow” , and also to convey a sense of a vanishing rural culture, once again in terms of the imagery and conceptual world of the Xhosa, as in “Milking Kraal” . ‘ – M. van Wyk Smith: Grounds of Contest. A Survey of South African English Literature.