Peter M. Sacks (born 1950) is an expatriate South African painter and poet living and working in the United States.
Although he had been making small scale paintings in notebooks for many years, which he had chosen to keep private, this led to an interest in working on canvas and a decision to exhibit.
The first U.S. solo show in 2009 of his finely textured paintings at Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery in New York City[7] received a review in Artforum (November 2009) by Rosalind Krauss.
An April 2017 solo show, Peter Sacks: New Works featured his Township Series and was accompanied by a catalogue introduced by Sebastian Smee.
A subsequent show, Peter Sacks: Migrations, at Marlborough Fine Art, London in 2018, featured a new body of work and an essay introduction to the catalogue by Paul Keegan.
The Library Journal, reviewing In These Mountains, said, "This first volume of poetry by a South African living in America is a quiet, understated, and complex work, ranging in subject from travel to homelessness; in feeling, from celebrations of beauty to painful recollection.
Weaving together myth, memory, and history to narrate the fate of South African Bushmen, the long title poem expresses Sacks's complex feelings—sorrow, outrage, loss toward his homeland.
O Wheel is a millennial collection of poems – some of them masquerading as diary notes – celebrating the beauty of the American West and the poet's love of his African home.
Its backdrop is an edgy mix of the intense violence of South Africa's recent history, the personal struggles of the human soul for the rights to speak freely and to experience justice, and the expanse of the American literary landscape.
[16][17] Although contest administrator Bin Ramke refused to name the judge who had selected Sacks's poems, the allegation was shown to be correct when documents were released following a Georgia Open Records Act request.
[17] About his 2003 book Necessity[18] Sacks said, "The poems make and record an unavoidable but potentially self-clarifying quest in the face of injustice, atrocity, beauty.