This story collection by multiple award-winning poet, author and playwright Kobus Moolman is a volume of unconventional potency. Written in a range of styles, voices and genres, each of the ten stories offers original insights into the difficulties of staying afloat. Whether the challenge is being differently abled (with all the outsider isolation this brings); lower-income family life under unbending patriarchal rule; or being born a female child in an abusive, gendered culture, the narratives are convincing (often humorous) in their portrayal of trapped lives striving for transcendence. The darkly funny `Kiss and the Brigadier' invokes the stultifying boredom of small-town life and the captured mentalities of its understimulated citizens; `Extracts from a Dispensable Life' offers a creative and sensitive reading of the gender violence theme; while the irreverent but never disrespectful `Angel Heart' ventures into the risky waters of religious send-up. The Swimming Lesson and Other Stories is a collection that stands out for its unusual perspectives; its frank, often uncomfortable treatment of taboo topics; its creative risk-taking; and its skilful and observant recreation of worlds gone by, which still leave their aftershocks.

A dried shoot is unable to drink where glass grows, and only silence swims in spaces the tongue leaves. Kobus Moolman's poems speak in the silences of our interactions with others and with ourselves. His close observations of what is immediate - and often imperfect - inspire poems that show us how to look at the everyday with new eyes. Time like Stone also contains excerpts from Moolman's Karoo journal, written during his stay in Nieu-Bethesda after winning the Helen Martins Fellowship, which trace the poet's struggle for language over silence. Moolman lives in Pietermaritzburg. He actively promotes and helps develop the work of aspirant writers and artists, and edits the poetry journal Fidelities.

This collection of poetry celebrates the quiet beauty of the ordinary. Kobus Moolman's subtle work speaks in the enigmatic strokes of abstract art. His poems give lyrical form and voice to the silence at the edge of language and comprehension. They have the fleeting but powerful visual quality of a world glimpsed through the moving car window, invoking the 'found moment' with an imaginative aptness that makes you smile with recognition.

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.

Deeper and richer than before, Kobus Moolman's voice in the poem cycle 'Light and After' gathers strength to climax in the third section 'Anatomy'. Sometimes terse and astringent, sometimes luxurious, the poems are always specific, rooted in the cycles of earth and body. This is a beautiful work, distinctively South African in its imagery and diction. - Joan Metelerkamp Moolman's strengths as one of the leading voices in South African poetry come through when he's most vulnerable - when he battles the varied manifestations of ordinary life. - Mxolisi Nyezwa, reviewing Separating the Seas 'Anatomy' is searing, honest and brave. It opens to the reader in progressively intimate revelations that enable one to experience the narrator's visceral reality. - Liesl Jobson, Judge's report, DALRO Prize awarded to Moolman's 'Anatomy' for best poem in New Coin 2008 Beneath the bare trees stripped to sky, and smelling of dust, two old hands hold, fold and rehold a thin sheet of earth 'Where is the wind? And why is the wind never a tree anymore?' the hands ask, folding. 'The bare branches of the bare trees no longer hold anything. All falls through the thin earth. Why, even the sky, ' the hands say, 'has dropped all of its clouds.' Kobus Moolman has published three collections of poetry: Time like Stone, Feet of the Sky and Separating the Seas, as well as several plays. He has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize, the PANSA award, and the DALRO poetry prize. He teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Afric