This Carting Life collects poems that span more than ten years of writing. A fair number of these poems have been published previously in either journals or anthologies, primarily in South Africa, but also abroad in the USA and, in some cases, in translation in France. Within the admittedly small market of poetry (as opposed to other forms of South African literature), the author has some reputation and has recently been awarded the Thomas Pringle Award for a poem published in New Contrast. As...
In this new collection Rustum Kozain, who won both the Ingrid Jonker Prize (2006) and the Olive Schreiner Prize (2007) for This Carting Life, raises his own bar. Groundwork retains strong connections with Kozain's early work, but it does so while simultaneously introducing a group of poems that indicate the promise of work to come. His voice has strengthened and has a new confidence, making the poems (paradoxically) lighter – though they are not without his trademark seriousness. This is a...
