Peter Sacks traverses morally charged landscapes in poems reminiscent of Rilke and Celan. Through the lens of Peter Sacks's actual journey from a strife-torn South Africa to a haunted and spiritually frayed America, Necessity travels from remembered heights unblemished by time's weight, through deserts laden by the debris of our mad dreams progress, conquest, salvation to arrive at the waters of communal memory, values, and love.

Peter M. Sacks (born in 1950) is an expatriate South African poet, painter, and literary critic living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Normandy, France. He is best known as a poet and teacher of writing.

Peter Sacks has published five books of poetry: In These Mountains (Macmillan 1986), Promised Lands (Penguin Books 1990), Natal Command (University of Chicago 1997), O Wheel (University of Georgia 2000), and Necessity (W.W. Norton 2002). Individual poems by Sacks have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boulevard, The Paris Review, and other publications. He is also the author of The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Johns Hopkins University 1985) and an art historical study, Woody Gwynn: An Approach to the Landscape (Texas Tech University 1993).

He received Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award for The English Elegy in 1985 and was the 1999 winner of the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series contest (although this award is controversial[1][2]). Summer 1999 he was a Lannan Foundation writer in residence in Marfa, Texas.