Rustum Kozain

Readers, welcome to my BOOK SA blog. I’ve been running a blog, Groundwork, since July 2006 and readers who scan the archives will notice that it is not updated too frequently. This is partly because I don’t always have something to say and I try and avoid a chatty tone. But while Groundwork is formal, it does not avoid lamenting Michael Schumacher’s retirement or the bad service in expensive Cape Town restaurants.

It is also mostly formal (and infrequently updated) because it is intended as an immediate forum for publishing and linking to bits and pieces of ’serious’ writing, like ‘Moedertang’, an autobiographical essay on English and Afrikaans at LitNet, or ‘The man who would be eaten’, which includes a recipe for preparing roasted JM Coetzee.

I’ve decided to get on the BOOK SA bus because it’s an energetic vehicle with a wider readership. Over the next few weeks, the Groundwork trailer will be firmly hitched to this bus so that whatever goes on there will automatically appear here. And perhaps BOOK SA enthusiasm will rub off on Groundwork and generate more frequent posts.

Here’s an extract from a recent poem, ‘Groundwork X’:

…As his heart explodes explodes
your mother by his side,
palm on his forehead.
He’s sorry, he’s sorry, so sorry, he says

and slips away…
lone dinghy unmoored, empty.
Rust at the prow-bracket,
the oar-locks the oar-locks gone.

And you are always somewhere else:
a cornfield brown as earth and the heart,
a room over a bay, dream state,
a free state always somewhere else

not in the hole with your brother
to stay the force, the dead weight
as bearers feed the corpse the corpse the body down.
The body that is now gone

in a sad cemetery, once forgotten
town by which you drift
home
strange as any foreign tongue…

• Complete poem

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Photo copyright Christina Fourie/Kwela.