Reviewed by Michael Northen
Beginning in 2001 with Time Like Stone, for which he won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut book, South African poet Kobus Moolman has been writing for over a quarter of a century. During that time, he has produced a collection of radio plays (Blind Voices), edited Tilling the Hard Soil (the first anthology of disability writing by South Africans), served as editor of the literary journal Fidelities, and written a collection of short stories (The Swimmer), all while continuing to produce books of poetry. That is an impressive resume for any writer, let alone one who has been helping to create the field of disability literature in South Africa. It is in the context of this long list of accomplishments that Moolman’s latest book Fall Risk must be approached.
From his first book, Moolman’s poetry has been marked by spare, physical observation:
On the top step of the ladder
you stand staring across the roofs
of the houses, the tree-tops, over
the barbed-wire garden walls, the dirty
streets thronged with traffic, across
the small yard, their chickens and children,
(Time Like Stone, p. 11)
One is constantly reminded of humankind’s insignificance and impermanence against the vastness of the South African sky and landscape. His lines are shorn of adjectives just as the land and people around them are stripped of all but what is most basic. Reading Moolman’s early work, one can’t help thinking of the American poet Stephen Crane.
Despite this feeling of deprivation, even when alluding to his own experiences growing up, Moolman did not bring the subject of the disabled body into his work. As late as his 2007 poetry collection, Separating the Seas, Moolman does not mention his own disability.
Moolman has recently written that for a long time, “I did not even know I was a disabled writer. I know that must sound odd. But the fact is, it took me a long time to put the two words, ’disabled’ and ‘writer’ together….”(Moolman, p. 288). Born with spina bifida with myelomeningocele, Moolman clearly knew he was disabled and was writing but resisted thinking of himself as a disabled writer because he did not want his writing to be propped up by pity.
With the book Left Over, Moolman finally turns his attention to his own body, though he does it with a Crane-like objectivity.
There is something about his right hand too,
something that terrifies him.
He can no longer click his fingers.
He can no longer put his hand
flat on the table.
He can no longer feel
when he cuts or bruises or burns himself.
It is only the sight of blood
on his clothes or blood on the bedspread
that alerts him to an injury.
He wonders how much longer
he will be able to hold himself upright
against the sky.
(“Fourteen Things No Longer There,” p. 16)
Those lines and a few about his own work:
Time is running out.
There is no time for long sentences
No long time for long stories any more.It’s just fragments now.
Hurried phrases
Snatches of phrases that dash across the white light. (p. 36)
set us up for Fall Risk.
As with Leftover, Fall Risk eschews titles, but there are concessions to organized structure. Blank pages throughout the volume divide the book into four parts and the “Index of Firsts Lines” at the end of the book gives a reader clues about where individual poems might begin. The poems bleed into each other, however, so that the first pieces in the book (those on pages 9-11) can be viewed as either single poems or as a triptych. In fact, the first three lines:
The body is twisted.
The body is tangled.
The body dissolves. (p. 9)
might serve to set both the book’s tone and theme. The poem’s chant-like structure is achieved through repetition. Moolman makes use both of the sounds of words and the invocation of natural elements such as sun, wind, stones, sky, and air that verge on the symbolic without becoming symbols. It feels like an archaic supplication for order.
The wind is drying out the darkness
drying out the smoke
from the hundred fires litto show God the way home. (p. 11)
With the book’s second section, Moolman turns away from nature and focuses on the plight of the disabled writer himself—presumably Moolman, despite continuing in a third person voice. Notwithstanding efforts to resist change by maintaining past habits, “every day he feels himself to be a different man from the one he was the day before.” (p. 19) This is not the gradual shift in perspective or mental attitude that is common to most people as they age, but an acutely physical one:
…his body that keeps dropping
day by day its broken bits. He cannot
even write about it anymore, the slow
process of losing, losing, losing,
over and over again. (p. 20)
The series of poems that follow document his attempts to deal with the reality of his condition against the apparent indifference of the universe until he finally declares:
I want to be stripped and dried out.
I want to be bleached as a bone.I want to evaporate. (p. 33)
What comes across in these pieces is a deep sense of despair. Looking out over the landscape that Moolman surveys one is reminded of Wallace Stephens’ “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Always the observer, what is missing in the landscape is any sense of humanity. Even the people who inhabit the poems are as much objects as the stones, hills, and trees—Buber’s it, rather than thou. Such a view contrasts markedly with the current strain in American disability poetry with its emphasis on community.
If much of that emphasis on the importance of community is the result of the view that most of what disabled people in the United States face is the result of our concept of disability as a social construction, there is a reason for that. As the disability anthology Beauty is a Verb demonstrated fifteen years ago, even through most of the last decade, disabled people simply did not write overtly about their lives. If they did, their work was not published. It was only through reading the work of those first writers who took the chance on writing what is now considered disability poetry that others realized they were not alone, and that achieving common cause could bring about changes in their lives. It is a crest that we are still riding.
Nevertheless, one has to ask whether this emphasis on community really does more than obscure the existential despair that Moolman is addressing. There is one poem from the book’s third section that seems to me to encapsulate his frustration:
I cannot sit still
when I see the moon
sliding slowly through the clouds.I want to throw something
at the black sky.
I want to drive out far
on a dirt road into the hills,
then turn around
and hurl myself at the moon.I am sick all over
of its perpetual beauty, its
remoteness on the hill.I want flesh. I want skin.
I want something on my tongue
I can bite. (p. 48)
This poem, an absolute rejection of Platonism and an embrace of embodiment, expresses anger that this is the case. Much of the third section of Fall Risk seems to be a scrambling to find some way to plug a hole in the dike of a leaking body, some way to adjust to the loss of hope or ultimate meaning.
In the three decades that disability poetry can claim recognition as a viable genre, there has been little effort given to taking a full measure of the lives of disabled writers, exploring how disability has shaped their writing by tracing its development and trajectory. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air about Larry Eigner is one exception, but these works require an intense amount of scholarship, time, and support. Until such time as we are able to have these full accounts, we are fortunate to have writers like Kobus Moolman, a multi-talented writer who has given us enough work that we can explore one road that has been created and traveled. Written in accessible language, Fall Risk is an emotionally difficult book of which the last word is doubt. The work forefronts the importance of embodiment in disability poetry and challenges readers, disabled and nondisabled, to face the meaning of our own existence.
Title: Fall Risk
Author: Kobus Moolman
Publisher: uHlanga
Date: 2024
Reference
Moolman, K. (2026). The Poetics of Falling. In C. L. Jones, M. Northen, N. Ortiz, & T. C. W Lau (Eds), Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays. Northwestern University Press.
Read Michael Northen’s review of Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Michael Northen is an editor of the disability poetry anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press), and the anthology of disability writing, Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, 2026). A book of his poetry, The Only One in the Room in White Socks, was published in July 2026 by Finishing Line Press.