GIFT NEVER GIVEN

n Damon Galgut’s 2008 book, The Impost or, a man named Adam loses his job and moves to a shack in the Karoo to try to write poetry. Like Galgut himself, who wrote his debut novel, A Sinless Season, when he was 17, Adam’s first collection – “poems about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic” – was published when he was a young man. But Adam has become aware of the weight of history