Grahamstown residence room with red curtains
A Book of Rooms
Kobus Moolman
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.
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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
Date of publication: 2014
ISBN 978-0-9870282-4-2 / ebook ISBN 978-1-928476-20-7
102 pages
200 x 130mm
R120.00
Kobus Moolman 2010 |
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. Books published Short stories Plays Books edited |
Additional information
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
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Reviews of this book
Review by Denis Hirson of A Book of Rooms by Kobus Moolman New Coin, 2015 text PDF
Review by Jim Ferris of A Book of Rooms by Kobus Moolman Wordgathering, 2015 text PDF
Interviews & Articles
Biography of Kobus Moolman by Kelwyn Sole Poetry International, 2013 text PDF
Article by Karen Jennings on A Book of Rooms by Kobus Moolman Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2019 text PDF
Interview with Kobus Moolman by Shaun Pieter Clamp Illuminations, 2020 text PDF
Interview with Kobus Moolman by Gary Cummiskey Dye Hard Interviews, 2011 text PDF
Editor’s Introduction by Kobus Moolman Illuminations, Special South Africa Issue, 2017 text PDF
Other Links
Reading
Kobus Moolman reads from his chapbook All and Everything Impepho Press YouTube, 2020
Reviews of other books
Review by Dan Wylie of The Mountain Behind the House by Kobus Moolman critical diaries Blogger, 2021
Review by Stuart Payne of The Mountain Behind the House by Kobus Moolman Stanzas, 2021
Review by Joan Metelerkamp of The Mountain Behind the House by Kobus Moolman New Coin, 2021
Review by Rosamund Stanford of Left Over by Kobus Moolman African Journal of Disability (Sabinet), 2014 text PDF
Review by Kelwyn Sole of Left Over by Kobus Moolman New Coin, 2014 text PDF
Review by Moira Richards of Light and After by Kobus Moolman New Coin (Rattle), 2011 text PDF
Review by Janet van Eeden of Light and After by Kobus Moolman LitNet, 2010 text PDF
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