A book of rooms
Published on 18. November 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
104 pages
978-0-9870282-4-2 (ISBN)
Description
A book of rooms, Kobus Moolman's new collection of poetry, deepens the explorations of his recent books Light and after and Left over. While their Beckett-like sparseness and doggedness is still there, A book of rooms moves into a realist-biographical narrative form. Arranged in physically dense scenes described as 'rooms', it inhabits the childhood and young adulthood of a man with a serious physical disability growing up in a grim family environment in the final years of the white side of apartheid. The reader is compelled immediately into the character's bleak and constant meetings with pain and failure. Yet inside this present-tense current can be felt a powerful will to live, sharp flashes of humour - and an even more powerful drive to know the truth.
Reviews / Votes
The reader is constantly located in the artist's body negotiating between the physical space of bricks and mortar, and the inner, imagined reality which is a shifting, unreliable space...The highlight of this collection is the third section, entitled "Anatomy"...an extended meditation on the body as the place of fragmentation and reconnection, depersonalistion and reintegration...searing, honest and brave, opening to the reader in progressively intimate revelations that enable one to experience firsthand the narrator's visceral reality. - Liesl Jobson reviewing Light and after (2011) in FMR book choice 2011. Working through a Moolman volume is both a rewarding and exhausting experience ... However in a country where poems are too often simply sound-bites for fleeting perceptions and states of mind, [...] Moolman moves into a different space entirely, and has taken a much more difficult and honest path. The reader will emerge from this poetry chastened but delighted. They are works of acumen, depth and extraordinary pressure. - Kelwyn Sole reviewing Left over (2013) in New coin, June 2014.More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Scottsville
South Africa
Dimensions
Height: 200 mm
Width: 130 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-9870282-4-2 (9780987028242)
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Person
Kobus Moolman is the author of seven collections of poetry, and several plays. He has won almost every poetry prize offered in South Africa: The Ingrid Jonker prize, the PANSA award, the South African literary award, the DALRO poetry prize and the Sol Plaatje European Union poetry award. He teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.