“A Book of Rooms deepens Kobus Moolman’s explorations in Light and After and Left Over, retaining the same Beckett-like sparseness and doggedness of those books, but in the form of a realist-biographical narrative. Organised in physically dense scenes labelled ‘rooms’, it inhabits the childhood and young adulthood of a man with a serious physical disability growing up in a grim family environment on the white side of apartheid in its final years. The reader is drawn immediately into the narrator’s meetings with pain and failure, and beneath these, his will to live, his sharp flashes of humour, and his need to know the truth.”
“Working through a Moolman volume is both a rewarding and exhausting experience … However in a country where poems are too often simply sound-bytes 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, New Coin
About the Author
From the Deep South Website:
“Kobus Moolman has published eleven collections of poetry, two books of plays and a collection of short stories. He has won numerous local and international awards for his scriptwriting and poetry, including the 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry for A Book of Rooms. He was guest editor of a special issue of Illuminations on new South African writing, and edited a special issue of Current Writing focusing on the teaching of creative writing. Moolman is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English Studies at the University of the Western Cape.”
