Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott's latest collection The Occupant (2016) is a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation, from Carcanet Press. Previous collections include Over, short-listed for the T S Eliot Prize, and a translation of the medieval Pearl (2011), a Stephen Spender Prize-winner. Storms Under the Skin, her translations of poems by Henri Michaux (Two Rivers Press) is a PBS Recommended Translation 2017.
Bernlef, Still Life, Guernica Editions, 2016, translated by Scott Rollins;
Remco Campert, In Those Days, Shoestring Press, 2014, translated by Donald Gardner;
Hester Knibbe, Hungerpots, Eyewear, 2015, translated by Jacqueline Pope;
Toon Tellegen, A Man and an Angel, Shoestring Press, 2013, translated by Judith Wilkinson; &
Cees Nooteboom, Light Everywhere, Seagull Books, 2014;
Ester Naomi Perquin, The Hunger in Plain View, White Pine Press, 2017;
Benno Barnard, A Public Woman, Eyewear, 2015;
Menno Wigman, Window-Cleaner Sees Paintings, Arc, 2016; &
Nachoem M. Wijnberg, Divan of Ghalib, White Pine Press, 2016, translated by David Colmer.
For a small-ish language community, Dutch writers achieve a remarkable international resonance, and poets seem to have been served exceptionally well by their translators, if recent publications in English are anything to go by. If one was looking for some recurring character across the wide variety of poetic invention among them it might be a kind of lucid wryness and clarity of gaze, an assertion that however historical or mythical association might illuminate our contemporary concerns, the heart of the matter lies under our noses, in the streets and lanes, in our apartments and institutions. Interestingly, the latest translations of entirely new collections – by the marvellous Toon Tellegen and Nachoem M. Wijnberg – fit this paradigm less readily, flying further towards the visionary perhaps, yet even here the world of experience remains entirely this one, the time still absolutely now.
The longer view: Cees Nooteboom, Bernlef and Remco Campert
Among the nine Dutch collections most recently published in English, seven are variations on the new-and-selected frame. Such collections always make for an interesting publishing moment. Poems previously living in separate rooms in the house find themselves called to the Grand Salon to rub up against each other, sometimes for the first time, and what may hitherto have been something of an imaginative life in chapters is revealed also as a deep patterning of pathways of imagery and concern.
Of all these, distinguished novelist and poet Cees Nooteboom’s Light Everywhere, translated by David Colmer in a fine hardback from Seagull Books, is without doubt the most interestingly arranged. Nooteboom, a recipient among many other awards of the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most important literary award in the Dutch-speaking world, selects poems from his twelve previous collections and presents them in inverse chronological order, a growth-of-a-poet’s-mind in reverse imprint. There’s little trace however of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ in Nooteboom’s interest in the imaginative self: ‘And what if we leave our selves/behind?’ he asks in ‘self’. It’s a central idea in a richly investigative poetics full of questions and questing, always on the track of something other, places elsewhere, encounters with the lives of others in other times – Hesiod, Bashō, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Borges, these are the locus for his vivid meditations on how to be both present and absent in the world:
On the ceiling the sea touches the luminous beach,
and no hand guiding all this...
just him…
in conversation with himself, dreaming and thinking,
present, invisible.
(‘afternoon’)
Nooteboom is among other things an acclaimed travel writer, composing with a fantastic clarity of scene and thought, beautifully translated by Colmer. Associative ideas are spun compactly around, brought to light in the most arresting of images: ‘the blue chair, the coffee on the terrace,/the day that folds around him slowly/and then swims off,/a gentle beast//with its prey’ (‘evening: In memory of Hugo Claus’). The book’s reverse direction of travel forms an excavation towards its own origins, starting from Light Everywhere (2012) via the spotlit focus of his 1964 Closed Poems to the The Black Poem from 1960, where the book ends and the poems began, at a hot Spanish station held in the moment like a parched version of ‘Adlestrop’ with the sense that from there, then, the only place to go was into the wide, surrounding elsewhere:
the train shudders and shrieks
in the languishing landscape,
why would I ever come back…?
(‘calera y chozas’)
The late Hendrik Jan Marsman, known by his pen name Bernlef, has like Nooteboom a wide readership both as a prose writer and a poet. Recipient of the P. C. Hooft Prize for the entire body of his poetic work, Bernlef named himself after the blind early Frisian poet, and there’s an alert attentiveness to sound across the whole fifty years of work represented in Still Life, translated by Scott Rollins (Guernica Editions, 2016). Almost every poem is a lesson in the held moment, a precise reckoning of all that rests undeclared and fugitive in any given moment of stasis:
It is said that parks are places of refuge
amid the hustle and bustle of the city.
More like the stasis before the leap,
an instance of intense concentration
(‘In Parks’)
Bernlef’s approach to the world could not be more distinct from Nooteboom’s. There are no questions. He’s a listener, offering a hearing rather than an interrogation. His poems don’t speak loudly but we listen all the more sharply along with him, a patient detective waiting for the truth to make itself apparent in the detail of a stopped moment. In the end Bernlef seems perhaps to be listening principally to and for himself:
I once stood in the middle of the desert and all I heard
was not silence, not Nothingness, but the coursing of my blood
the beating of my heart amid the desolation of sand.
(‘Nothingness’)
And in the end the close reader will do the same, enabled by these poems to hear the ‘voices/that meant as whispers, suddenly carry further/across the water’ (’What We Need’).
In Those Days by the central poetic figure of Remco Campert (Shoestring Press, 2014) is a new selection from over sixty years’ work which won the prestigious Vondel Prize for its translator, poet Donald Gardner. Recently awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, Campert was associated originally with the ‘Fifties’ postwar experimental movement (De vijftigers). His city-wandering, urbane poems free-fall almost entirely without punctuation, cool and gently ironic in tone, matter-of-fact in their phrasing, in an almost anti-poetic resistance to drama that began in his post-war youth:
The whole of Europe was one huge mattress
and heaven the ceiling of a no-star hotel.
While bashful young chap that I was
I felt driven
to sing the undefiled birch tree
the modest splendour of its foliage
(‘Incredible’)
Campert’s irony is very finely tuned – that compact, second-placed image of the ‘undefiled birch tree’ is typically subtle – and even in the most conversational and apparently straightforward poems his sense of wry melancholy is closely allied to disappointment and disillusion. The world is treacherous if you look closely and stop to remember, which Campert frequently does:
my mother was watching from the window
when the German officer rang the neighbours’ bell…
I’d almost forgotten her
past and future meant nothing to me
All I cared about was the day at hand
my time hadn’t yet come
(‘1944’)
If his tone is slippery it’s because the world is slippery. Little is reliable: ‘the sun unfolds its parasol…/the children go home/the cats a black blast of wind/...here and there the earth sobs/feathers of grief.’ (‘Every Day’). Quietly, incrementally, the sixty-year span of poems in In Those Days gathers authority and pathos, particularly once the later work steps up more performatively to the microphone, not least in a cascading, allusive 2005 piece ‘Solo on a Drunken April Night’ which Gardner translates with admirable verve. For a poet whose principal reflex has been to resist showmanship, Campert’s is a voice that In Those Days makes one want to hear in performance.
Kinds of hunger: Ester Naomi Perquin and Hester Knibbe
It may be an accident of timing or perhaps a reflection of a wider historical picture, but it’s surprising to find that of nine recently published collections of Dutch poetry in English only two are by female poets, Ester Naomi Perquin and Hester Knibbe, both former recipients of the Netherlands’ VSB Prize for poetry as well as Rotterdam Poets Laureate, both powerfully clear-sighted and transformative in their poetics. Perquin ’s The Hunger in Plain View: Selected Poems is her first book in English, newly out in a translation by David Colmer from White Pine Press (2017). Perquin is a poet of subtly inventive imagination and the earlier poems reveal an already highly distinctive voice – deceptively calm and ironic, charged with an unremitting sense of misfortune and threat: ‘You can do it all in a single day: fall in love with a man,/pat yourself on and knife yourself in the back’ (‘Example’), ‘I see him in his bathroom…/he smears soap over his jaws,/ then takes a razor to slice/ the wolf off his face’ (‘Full Moon’).
But it is in the poems from her 2012 collection Cell Inspections (Celinspecties) that the mature power of Perquin’s haunting understanding emerges in its full transformative reach. In a series of sub-documentary poems about the lives of male prisoners (Perquin worked as a prison officer for four years), she creates a montage of spellbinding narrations of what it is to be imprisoned and facing the darkness of past treacheries and failures, of incarceration itself:
I had no idea what was going on, anyway everyone
I saw there left me out of it because
I wasn’t there. Not that night….
I remember I was home in bed where
I was and looking out and thinking
it’s not often you see such
a deep black.
(‘Statement’)
Perhaps the most affecting aspect of all in these prison poems is the feeling for the chance or hazard which can bring offenders to such a point. In the astounding two-part poem ‘Confessions’ the voice of fate, or time, rewinds the men to their infant beginnings:
Lying there looking at the sky for the first time, they waved
their little hands in front of their eyes, invented sounds…
So alone and all those troubles still to come.
Crying in desperation.
Perquin has widely been recognised as talent of great promise, and the closing new sequence ‘Table Talk’ promises more extraordinary work to come, the vitality of her enquiry more persistent than ever: ‘Every dinner has a raped woman. A homosexual./An illiterate. A man who knows what all/the spoons are for. You’re better off/not talking to him.’
Where hunger in Perquin’s poems is the hunger of desire and frustration, in Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots (Eyewear, 2015) it is the terrible empty vessel of loss. Jacqueline Pope’s sure-footed translation allows us to see how sustainedly Knibbe, a major voice in Netherlands poetry, has sought to make sense of and converse with mutability and ‘the wounds of the world’, in poems which are dreamlike and simultaneously unflinchingly clear. Even in her most personal poems Knibbe’s reach is wide, her restless intelligence often finding its mark in the world of classical and biblical narrative. In Disturbed Ground, the 2002 collection following the death of her son, Knibbe found her own experience in the ancient story of the flood: ‘You saw//your world turned upside down… /Now you sit,/ram and ewe already on dry ground,/ all at sea in flotsam and jetsam’ (‘After the Flood’).
But Knibbe is a far from conventionally elegiac poet. Her continuing conversation with transience and change is never less than powerful, typically restrained in the moving last lines of ‘Michelango’s Pietà’: ‘Just died,//neither lamb nor shepherd, to lie/still in the marble of a mother’, and fiercely immediate in its insistence on the present while considering what is lost:
… Don’t look
at what was lost, darling, look
how I lapse in time
lying there at your feet.
(‘Eurydice’)
In the most attentive and deliberate of ways, Knibbe’s poems keep a direct line open to the past, personal and communal, perhaps most lyrically in the central, wonderfully compressed ‘Letter from Pompeii’: ‘I stroll around, my eye on/what might spare me in/ a coming thousand-year void.’ Her most recent work is also in many ways the most exciting as she works an affecting and expert tension between formal and harmonic resolution and a vital acknowledgement of doubt and uncertainty:
… I dug and dug in the earth
constantly finding under and under but once exhumed it was
a mountain where each answer every surprise
has to find itself among the others.
(‘There Is Always’)
History and the city: Benno Barnard and Menno Wigman
Benno Barnard’s A Public Woman, a collection of sensual and often dramatic poems translated by David Colmer in 2015, also from Eyewear, shares with Knibbe’s work an expansive fusion of intimate and communal experience. But Barnard’s engagement in particular is with Europe’s history, its self-examining narratives, its passages of terror. His sense of himself is of a ‘piece of the Continent’:
The bar is spinning from the cigarettes…
‘No one told us who we were.’
We scrape our hearts out till they’re empty.
We mumble like Jews.
The day is white as dough.
I stare with stinging eyes
at the gods’ gold watch,
hung between the fraying clouds:
the time is three thousand years in Europe.
(‘Aubade’)
This is intensely personal and self-conscious work, barely an intimate moment without its setting or view to the wider cultural backdrop, not least in the popular ‘A Kiss in Brussels’, the elegantly chiming poem which opens the collection: ‘Here for a second in this city park,/we’re two cold lovers mouthing March,/who kiss as though exchanging quotes.’ This cinematic sense of scene seems closely allied to Barnard’s feeling for what the idea of home might mean, and how a sense of our geo-political and cultural inheritance is ultimately indivisible from narratives of parentage. All this comes together most strikingly in the moving vocalisations in his verse-play A Public Woman: ‘in seven thousand years of humanity/two generations have arisen. No more./… Parents and children/Parents and children.’ The three-act play is a monologue in the self-dramatising voice of Coco, an actress, as she recounts her life across the decades of the 20th century, invoking a stage-full of other voices along the way (Apollinaire and Dietrich, Shakespeare and Schwitters, Eliot and Fellini to name but a few). Abused and desired in parallel measure, Coco performs her history in a set-piece display of Barnard’s singular talent for surprising imagery and formal range, finely relayed in Colmer’s translation.
Colmer is also the translator of Menno Wigman’sWindow-Cleaner Sees Paintings (Arc, 2016) a bilingual, facing-page selection in which Wigman’s chafing narratives of contemporary life ring with a harmonic patterning that gives a resistant, musical formality to his determinedly modern and urbane poetics. It’s a synthesis encapsulated beautifully in the title poem in which a window-cleaner sees into the lives of apartment-dwellers and the art on their walls: ‘I’m hung here like an icy masterpiece … /I huff and scrub and clarify the view – /touching up the clouds that show the master’s hand.//Look. Some sunlight’s slipped into my canvas.’
Wigman’s settings are a mood board for the millennial city and the ways in which lives and loves flourish and fade in its private and public spaces – ‘the traffic’s roar’, the garden centre, the supermarket, CCTV, crowds and crime – all observed with a singular grace and cynicism. A memorable example is the poem written for a Lonely Funerals reading at one of Amsterdam’s municipal funerals:
time, that dirty carnivore, ensures an end
that stinks. But she’s asleep at last, asleep.
So cover her up, make sure her weary feet
don’t need to tread the streets again.
(‘Beside Mrs P.’s Council Coffin’)
And Wigman knows what he feels about the countryside too (‘No sparkling conversation from the forest’s edge, no shrub or cuckoo makes a word of sense…./Oh, save me from this putrid green excess’ - ‘Against Nature’) in new work that intensifies into an even angrier kind of rake’s progress, dramatised in strong iambics and an almost savage note reminiscent of Molière or Berkoff:
I read that the police have now grown wise
(with more than fifty dead in just three years)
and check the floaters first for undone flies.
Booze trails its curse through Amsterdam.
The water reaches up at night with dripping hands,
(‘To the Bottom’)
The mirror, the poet and the angel: Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Toon Tellegen
The new publications in English by Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Toon Tellegen are fresh in several senses of the word, translations of new full collections, both highly original in their imagining and narrations. Wijnberg’s Divan of Ghalib (White Pine Press, translated by David Colmer, 2016) is a contemplative, virtuoso sequence in conversation with the poems of 19th-century Delhi poet, Ghalib, a master of the Persian ghazal. It’s a form which plays tantalisingly with repetition, variation and reflection, notably integrating the poet’s own name as part of its formal dance:
One day we will say if we want to be together in the daytime,
And if we want to be quiet in the dark.
What are you doing, Ghalib, besides saying what it is like here once again?
As if someone in the dark wants to hear that.
(‘In the Dark’)
Wijnberg’s new divan, speaking in turns to and with and about Ghalib, creates a fractalling house of mirrors in which to consider the many provisional views of the I and the ‘you’, how we came to be and what we might all be to each other within our traditions, not least the poet-self whose role it is to consider such things:
I write on my forehead for when I cannot speak,
Glad I learned mirror writing when I was a child.
I am happy to be allowed to stand here before you,
Because, because,
Because this is my job.
(‘Bird’)
An echoing circulation of motifs embodies these ideas of alternative possibility and provisionality: cloths and clothing are put on and taken off, doors and windows open and close, gardens are stepped into and out of, lovers and companions are always on the point of arriving or leaving, questions formulate themselves in self-cancelling phrasing:
Something that keeps going so I can return to it, it doesn’t keep going forever it’s actually soon over
(‘Fire’)
Images of darkness, water and reflection recur and resurface, and through the hall of mirrors all kinds of characters pass: Queen Victoria and her ministers, Adam and Eve and the angel, Moses, Abraham and Isaac, Leah and Rachel, Jesus and Joseph. In an echo of the cubist project (‘a bird with a face on both sides of is head’) the sequence’s shifting ‘you’ encompasses the figures of Ghalib, together with Wijnberg-Ghalib’s unidentified, other-worldly companion – ‘When I am being taken away over the dark water,/You will be standing on the bank, quiet as I pass’ (‘Water’) - and always present, Wijnberg himself:
… if you look quickly you can see yourself somewhere no matter where you are standing.
(‘Mirrors’)
New work from the wonderfully singular imagination of Toon Tellegen is always an event, and A Man and an Angel in Judith Wilkinson’s translation from Shoestring Press is no exception. Tellegen’s playfully serious poetics in over twenty collections have gained him a deserved international audience: ‘everybody on the Moscow underground seems to be reading Tellegen,’ reports Wilkinson. Drawing strongly on the fantastical tradition of folklore, Tellegen’s absurd and utterly contemporary narratives have always been charged with the complex and mysterious logic of dream, while never less than simply expressed.
A Man and an Angel seems especially philosophical, invoking the biblical tale of Jacob wrestling with the angel, ‘man at his limits’ as Wilkinson terms it in her excellent introduction. In an echo of Wijnberg’s hall of mirrors, Tellegen’s man and angel come together and break apart, fuse and dissociate as the episodic fight between them continues: ‘An angel looked at a man,/ but the man said: I am looking at myself… .//then the angel flew away/and the man got up, threw stones after him,/shouted:/as if I can fly…!’ (‘An angel looked at a man’). In a brilliantly disquieting double-effect, Tellegen’s phrasing retains all its tales-by-the-fire simplicity while considering the moral and psychological challenge at the heart of the biblical story:
it had been a fine day
and the angel shrivelled up,
became smaller and smaller,
smaller than a butterfly, than a fly, than a speck of dust,
the man couldn’t see him anymore
and said:
angel, little angel, where are you …
… I’m here, said the angel
and he struck the man down.
(‘An angel saw a man’)
It’s a long night with the beautiful powerful angel and as the closing poems confirm, a fight until death. Each brief poem’s moment twists and turns in Tellegen’s distinctive compactness, so deceptively light in its execution, as noted memorably by poet and critic Herman de Conink: ‘With their fairy-tale speed, his poems encompass entire novels.’ When a Man and an Angel was first published in 2009 (original title Stof dat als een Meisje) it was widely praised as one of Tellegen’s finest collections, reprinting soon after publication. With Judith Wilkinson’s agile translation now available, English readers are lucky enough to be able to see exactly why.
Remco Campert, In Those Days, Shoestring Press, 2014, translated by Donald Gardner;
Hester Knibbe, Hungerpots, Eyewear, 2015, translated by Jacqueline Pope;
Toon Tellegen, A Man and an Angel, Shoestring Press, 2013, translated by Judith Wilkinson; &
Cees Nooteboom, Light Everywhere, Seagull Books, 2014;
Ester Naomi Perquin, The Hunger in Plain View, White Pine Press, 2017;
Benno Barnard, A Public Woman, Eyewear, 2015;
Menno Wigman, Window-Cleaner Sees Paintings, Arc, 2016; &
Nachoem M. Wijnberg, Divan of Ghalib, White Pine Press, 2016, translated by David Colmer.
For a small-ish language community, Dutch writers achieve a remarkable international resonance, and poets seem to have been served exceptionally well by their translators, if recent publications in English are anything to go by. If one was looking for some recurring character across the wide variety of poetic invention among them it might be a kind of lucid wryness and clarity of gaze, an assertion that however historical or mythical association might illuminate our contemporary concerns, the heart of the matter lies under our noses, in the streets and lanes, in our apartments and institutions. Interestingly, the latest translations of entirely new collections – by the marvellous Toon Tellegen and Nachoem M. Wijnberg – fit this paradigm less readily, flying further towards the visionary perhaps, yet even here the world of experience remains entirely this one, the time still absolutely now.
The longer view: Cees Nooteboom, Bernlef and Remco Campert
Among the nine Dutch collections most recently published in English, seven are variations on the new-and-selected frame. Such collections always make for an interesting publishing moment. Poems previously living in separate rooms in the house find themselves called to the Grand Salon to rub up against each other, sometimes for the first time, and what may hitherto have been something of an imaginative life in chapters is revealed also as a deep patterning of pathways of imagery and concern.
Of all these, distinguished novelist and poet Cees Nooteboom’s Light Everywhere, translated by David Colmer in a fine hardback from Seagull Books, is without doubt the most interestingly arranged. Nooteboom, a recipient among many other awards of the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most important literary award in the Dutch-speaking world, selects poems from his twelve previous collections and presents them in inverse chronological order, a growth-of-a-poet’s-mind in reverse imprint. There’s little trace however of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ in Nooteboom’s interest in the imaginative self: ‘And what if we leave our selves/behind?’ he asks in ‘self’. It’s a central idea in a richly investigative poetics full of questions and questing, always on the track of something other, places elsewhere, encounters with the lives of others in other times – Hesiod, Bashō, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Borges, these are the locus for his vivid meditations on how to be both present and absent in the world:
On the ceiling the sea touches the luminous beach,
and no hand guiding all this...
just him…
in conversation with himself, dreaming and thinking,
present, invisible.
(‘afternoon’)
Nooteboom is among other things an acclaimed travel writer, composing with a fantastic clarity of scene and thought, beautifully translated by Colmer. Associative ideas are spun compactly around, brought to light in the most arresting of images: ‘the blue chair, the coffee on the terrace,/the day that folds around him slowly/and then swims off,/a gentle beast//with its prey’ (‘evening: In memory of Hugo Claus’). The book’s reverse direction of travel forms an excavation towards its own origins, starting from Light Everywhere (2012) via the spotlit focus of his 1964 Closed Poems to the The Black Poem from 1960, where the book ends and the poems began, at a hot Spanish station held in the moment like a parched version of ‘Adlestrop’ with the sense that from there, then, the only place to go was into the wide, surrounding elsewhere:
the train shudders and shrieks
in the languishing landscape,
why would I ever come back…?
(‘calera y chozas’)
The late Hendrik Jan Marsman, known by his pen name Bernlef, has like Nooteboom a wide readership both as a prose writer and a poet. Recipient of the P. C. Hooft Prize for the entire body of his poetic work, Bernlef named himself after the blind early Frisian poet, and there’s an alert attentiveness to sound across the whole fifty years of work represented in Still Life, translated by Scott Rollins (Guernica Editions, 2016). Almost every poem is a lesson in the held moment, a precise reckoning of all that rests undeclared and fugitive in any given moment of stasis:
It is said that parks are places of refuge
amid the hustle and bustle of the city.
More like the stasis before the leap,
an instance of intense concentration
(‘In Parks’)
Bernlef’s approach to the world could not be more distinct from Nooteboom’s. There are no questions. He’s a listener, offering a hearing rather than an interrogation. His poems don’t speak loudly but we listen all the more sharply along with him, a patient detective waiting for the truth to make itself apparent in the detail of a stopped moment. In the end Bernlef seems perhaps to be listening principally to and for himself:
I once stood in the middle of the desert and all I heard
was not silence, not Nothingness, but the coursing of my blood
the beating of my heart amid the desolation of sand.
(‘Nothingness’)
And in the end the close reader will do the same, enabled by these poems to hear the ‘voices/that meant as whispers, suddenly carry further/across the water’ (’What We Need’).
In Those Days by the central poetic figure of Remco Campert (Shoestring Press, 2014) is a new selection from over sixty years’ work which won the prestigious Vondel Prize for its translator, poet Donald Gardner. Recently awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, Campert was associated originally with the ‘Fifties’ postwar experimental movement (De vijftigers). His city-wandering, urbane poems free-fall almost entirely without punctuation, cool and gently ironic in tone, matter-of-fact in their phrasing, in an almost anti-poetic resistance to drama that began in his post-war youth:
The whole of Europe was one huge mattress
and heaven the ceiling of a no-star hotel.
While bashful young chap that I was
I felt driven
to sing the undefiled birch tree
the modest splendour of its foliage
(‘Incredible’)
Campert’s irony is very finely tuned – that compact, second-placed image of the ‘undefiled birch tree’ is typically subtle – and even in the most conversational and apparently straightforward poems his sense of wry melancholy is closely allied to disappointment and disillusion. The world is treacherous if you look closely and stop to remember, which Campert frequently does:
my mother was watching from the window
when the German officer rang the neighbours’ bell…
I’d almost forgotten her
past and future meant nothing to me
All I cared about was the day at hand
my time hadn’t yet come
(‘1944’)
If his tone is slippery it’s because the world is slippery. Little is reliable: ‘the sun unfolds its parasol…/the children go home/the cats a black blast of wind/...here and there the earth sobs/feathers of grief.’ (‘Every Day’). Quietly, incrementally, the sixty-year span of poems in In Those Days gathers authority and pathos, particularly once the later work steps up more performatively to the microphone, not least in a cascading, allusive 2005 piece ‘Solo on a Drunken April Night’ which Gardner translates with admirable verve. For a poet whose principal reflex has been to resist showmanship, Campert’s is a voice that In Those Days makes one want to hear in performance.
Kinds of hunger: Ester Naomi Perquin and Hester Knibbe
It may be an accident of timing or perhaps a reflection of a wider historical picture, but it’s surprising to find that of nine recently published collections of Dutch poetry in English only two are by female poets, Ester Naomi Perquin and Hester Knibbe, both former recipients of the Netherlands’ VSB Prize for poetry as well as Rotterdam Poets Laureate, both powerfully clear-sighted and transformative in their poetics. Perquin ’s The Hunger in Plain View: Selected Poems is her first book in English, newly out in a translation by David Colmer from White Pine Press (2017). Perquin is a poet of subtly inventive imagination and the earlier poems reveal an already highly distinctive voice – deceptively calm and ironic, charged with an unremitting sense of misfortune and threat: ‘You can do it all in a single day: fall in love with a man,/pat yourself on and knife yourself in the back’ (‘Example’), ‘I see him in his bathroom…/he smears soap over his jaws,/ then takes a razor to slice/ the wolf off his face’ (‘Full Moon’).
But it is in the poems from her 2012 collection Cell Inspections (Celinspecties) that the mature power of Perquin’s haunting understanding emerges in its full transformative reach. In a series of sub-documentary poems about the lives of male prisoners (Perquin worked as a prison officer for four years), she creates a montage of spellbinding narrations of what it is to be imprisoned and facing the darkness of past treacheries and failures, of incarceration itself:
I had no idea what was going on, anyway everyone
I saw there left me out of it because
I wasn’t there. Not that night….
I remember I was home in bed where
I was and looking out and thinking
it’s not often you see such
a deep black.
(‘Statement’)
Perhaps the most affecting aspect of all in these prison poems is the feeling for the chance or hazard which can bring offenders to such a point. In the astounding two-part poem ‘Confessions’ the voice of fate, or time, rewinds the men to their infant beginnings:
Lying there looking at the sky for the first time, they waved
their little hands in front of their eyes, invented sounds…
So alone and all those troubles still to come.
Crying in desperation.
Perquin has widely been recognised as talent of great promise, and the closing new sequence ‘Table Talk’ promises more extraordinary work to come, the vitality of her enquiry more persistent than ever: ‘Every dinner has a raped woman. A homosexual./An illiterate. A man who knows what all/the spoons are for. You’re better off/not talking to him.’
Where hunger in Perquin’s poems is the hunger of desire and frustration, in Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots (Eyewear, 2015) it is the terrible empty vessel of loss. Jacqueline Pope’s sure-footed translation allows us to see how sustainedly Knibbe, a major voice in Netherlands poetry, has sought to make sense of and converse with mutability and ‘the wounds of the world’, in poems which are dreamlike and simultaneously unflinchingly clear. Even in her most personal poems Knibbe’s reach is wide, her restless intelligence often finding its mark in the world of classical and biblical narrative. In Disturbed Ground, the 2002 collection following the death of her son, Knibbe found her own experience in the ancient story of the flood: ‘You saw//your world turned upside down… /Now you sit,/ram and ewe already on dry ground,/ all at sea in flotsam and jetsam’ (‘After the Flood’).
But Knibbe is a far from conventionally elegiac poet. Her continuing conversation with transience and change is never less than powerful, typically restrained in the moving last lines of ‘Michelango’s Pietà’: ‘Just died,//neither lamb nor shepherd, to lie/still in the marble of a mother’, and fiercely immediate in its insistence on the present while considering what is lost:
… Don’t look
at what was lost, darling, look
how I lapse in time
lying there at your feet.
(‘Eurydice’)
In the most attentive and deliberate of ways, Knibbe’s poems keep a direct line open to the past, personal and communal, perhaps most lyrically in the central, wonderfully compressed ‘Letter from Pompeii’: ‘I stroll around, my eye on/what might spare me in/ a coming thousand-year void.’ Her most recent work is also in many ways the most exciting as she works an affecting and expert tension between formal and harmonic resolution and a vital acknowledgement of doubt and uncertainty:
… I dug and dug in the earth
constantly finding under and under but once exhumed it was
a mountain where each answer every surprise
has to find itself among the others.
(‘There Is Always’)
History and the city: Benno Barnard and Menno Wigman
Benno Barnard’s A Public Woman, a collection of sensual and often dramatic poems translated by David Colmer in 2015, also from Eyewear, shares with Knibbe’s work an expansive fusion of intimate and communal experience. But Barnard’s engagement in particular is with Europe’s history, its self-examining narratives, its passages of terror. His sense of himself is of a ‘piece of the Continent’:
The bar is spinning from the cigarettes…
‘No one told us who we were.’
We scrape our hearts out till they’re empty.
We mumble like Jews.
The day is white as dough.
I stare with stinging eyes
at the gods’ gold watch,
hung between the fraying clouds:
the time is three thousand years in Europe.
(‘Aubade’)
This is intensely personal and self-conscious work, barely an intimate moment without its setting or view to the wider cultural backdrop, not least in the popular ‘A Kiss in Brussels’, the elegantly chiming poem which opens the collection: ‘Here for a second in this city park,/we’re two cold lovers mouthing March,/who kiss as though exchanging quotes.’ This cinematic sense of scene seems closely allied to Barnard’s feeling for what the idea of home might mean, and how a sense of our geo-political and cultural inheritance is ultimately indivisible from narratives of parentage. All this comes together most strikingly in the moving vocalisations in his verse-play A Public Woman: ‘in seven thousand years of humanity/two generations have arisen. No more./… Parents and children/Parents and children.’ The three-act play is a monologue in the self-dramatising voice of Coco, an actress, as she recounts her life across the decades of the 20th century, invoking a stage-full of other voices along the way (Apollinaire and Dietrich, Shakespeare and Schwitters, Eliot and Fellini to name but a few). Abused and desired in parallel measure, Coco performs her history in a set-piece display of Barnard’s singular talent for surprising imagery and formal range, finely relayed in Colmer’s translation.
Colmer is also the translator of Menno Wigman’sWindow-Cleaner Sees Paintings (Arc, 2016) a bilingual, facing-page selection in which Wigman’s chafing narratives of contemporary life ring with a harmonic patterning that gives a resistant, musical formality to his determinedly modern and urbane poetics. It’s a synthesis encapsulated beautifully in the title poem in which a window-cleaner sees into the lives of apartment-dwellers and the art on their walls: ‘I’m hung here like an icy masterpiece … /I huff and scrub and clarify the view – /touching up the clouds that show the master’s hand.//Look. Some sunlight’s slipped into my canvas.’
Wigman’s settings are a mood board for the millennial city and the ways in which lives and loves flourish and fade in its private and public spaces – ‘the traffic’s roar’, the garden centre, the supermarket, CCTV, crowds and crime – all observed with a singular grace and cynicism. A memorable example is the poem written for a Lonely Funerals reading at one of Amsterdam’s municipal funerals:
time, that dirty carnivore, ensures an end
that stinks. But she’s asleep at last, asleep.
So cover her up, make sure her weary feet
don’t need to tread the streets again.
(‘Beside Mrs P.’s Council Coffin’)
And Wigman knows what he feels about the countryside too (‘No sparkling conversation from the forest’s edge, no shrub or cuckoo makes a word of sense…./Oh, save me from this putrid green excess’ - ‘Against Nature’) in new work that intensifies into an even angrier kind of rake’s progress, dramatised in strong iambics and an almost savage note reminiscent of Molière or Berkoff:
I read that the police have now grown wise
(with more than fifty dead in just three years)
and check the floaters first for undone flies.
Booze trails its curse through Amsterdam.
The water reaches up at night with dripping hands,
(‘To the Bottom’)
The mirror, the poet and the angel: Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Toon Tellegen
The new publications in English by Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Toon Tellegen are fresh in several senses of the word, translations of new full collections, both highly original in their imagining and narrations. Wijnberg’s Divan of Ghalib (White Pine Press, translated by David Colmer, 2016) is a contemplative, virtuoso sequence in conversation with the poems of 19th-century Delhi poet, Ghalib, a master of the Persian ghazal. It’s a form which plays tantalisingly with repetition, variation and reflection, notably integrating the poet’s own name as part of its formal dance:
One day we will say if we want to be together in the daytime,
And if we want to be quiet in the dark.
What are you doing, Ghalib, besides saying what it is like here once again?
As if someone in the dark wants to hear that.
(‘In the Dark’)
Wijnberg’s new divan, speaking in turns to and with and about Ghalib, creates a fractalling house of mirrors in which to consider the many provisional views of the I and the ‘you’, how we came to be and what we might all be to each other within our traditions, not least the poet-self whose role it is to consider such things:
I write on my forehead for when I cannot speak,
Glad I learned mirror writing when I was a child.
I am happy to be allowed to stand here before you,
Because, because,
Because this is my job.
(‘Bird’)
An echoing circulation of motifs embodies these ideas of alternative possibility and provisionality: cloths and clothing are put on and taken off, doors and windows open and close, gardens are stepped into and out of, lovers and companions are always on the point of arriving or leaving, questions formulate themselves in self-cancelling phrasing:
Something that keeps going so I can return to it, it doesn’t keep going forever it’s actually soon over
(‘Fire’)
Images of darkness, water and reflection recur and resurface, and through the hall of mirrors all kinds of characters pass: Queen Victoria and her ministers, Adam and Eve and the angel, Moses, Abraham and Isaac, Leah and Rachel, Jesus and Joseph. In an echo of the cubist project (‘a bird with a face on both sides of is head’) the sequence’s shifting ‘you’ encompasses the figures of Ghalib, together with Wijnberg-Ghalib’s unidentified, other-worldly companion – ‘When I am being taken away over the dark water,/You will be standing on the bank, quiet as I pass’ (‘Water’) - and always present, Wijnberg himself:
… if you look quickly you can see yourself somewhere no matter where you are standing.
(‘Mirrors’)
New work from the wonderfully singular imagination of Toon Tellegen is always an event, and A Man and an Angel in Judith Wilkinson’s translation from Shoestring Press is no exception. Tellegen’s playfully serious poetics in over twenty collections have gained him a deserved international audience: ‘everybody on the Moscow underground seems to be reading Tellegen,’ reports Wilkinson. Drawing strongly on the fantastical tradition of folklore, Tellegen’s absurd and utterly contemporary narratives have always been charged with the complex and mysterious logic of dream, while never less than simply expressed.
A Man and an Angel seems especially philosophical, invoking the biblical tale of Jacob wrestling with the angel, ‘man at his limits’ as Wilkinson terms it in her excellent introduction. In an echo of Wijnberg’s hall of mirrors, Tellegen’s man and angel come together and break apart, fuse and dissociate as the episodic fight between them continues: ‘An angel looked at a man,/ but the man said: I am looking at myself… .//then the angel flew away/and the man got up, threw stones after him,/shouted:/as if I can fly…!’ (‘An angel looked at a man’). In a brilliantly disquieting double-effect, Tellegen’s phrasing retains all its tales-by-the-fire simplicity while considering the moral and psychological challenge at the heart of the biblical story:
it had been a fine day
and the angel shrivelled up,
became smaller and smaller,
smaller than a butterfly, than a fly, than a speck of dust,
the man couldn’t see him anymore
and said:
angel, little angel, where are you …
… I’m here, said the angel
and he struck the man down.
(‘An angel saw a man’)
It’s a long night with the beautiful powerful angel and as the closing poems confirm, a fight until death. Each brief poem’s moment twists and turns in Tellegen’s distinctive compactness, so deceptively light in its execution, as noted memorably by poet and critic Herman de Conink: ‘With their fairy-tale speed, his poems encompass entire novels.’ When a Man and an Angel was first published in 2009 (original title Stof dat als een Meisje) it was widely praised as one of Tellegen’s finest collections, reprinting soon after publication. With Judith Wilkinson’s agile translation now available, English readers are lucky enough to be able to see exactly why.
