About Rutger Kopland
Rutger Kopland published his first collection, Onder het vee (Among the Cattle), in 1966 at a time when realism ruled supreme in Dutch poetry. It is still apparent in Kopland’s work, in which he invariably seeks to connect with day-to-day reality. But the poet wants to do more than just describe; his poems try, however modestly, to offer some solace from the disappointments of life. From the very start they have been imbued with the paradisiacal vision of Psalm 23 and the fact that we, with ‘all those fine promises’ (the title of one of his collections), are seeking happiness all our lives. It is this very vision that inspired one of his most famous poems, the ironical portrait of a ‘Young Lettuce’ which became, not by accident, a true evergreen.
In the 1980s and ’90s his poetry grew sparser, less ironical and anecdotal, but the spirit was still that of a poet looking for consolation in the complexity and seeming futility of life. His poem ‘Drentse A’, for instance, is almost a personification of the human condition, in which the river ‘has succumbed to what it is, between its banks,/ in the aimless trail/ it has dug’. Whatever form they take, Kopland’s poems are bound to treat the mysteries of life, death, love and chance. They are, in the poet’s own words, ‘variations on a theme’.
It is undoubtedly the human aspect of his poems that has made Rutger Kopland one of the Netherlands’ most read poets for over forty years. He asks essential questions without answering them definitely; in his poems man is first and foremost a searching creature. And for that indefinite search he has coined his own inimitable lyrical style, groping, tentative, full of repetitions, minor shifts and modulations. After all, ‘happiness/ must exist somewhere at some time because/ we remember it and it remembers us’.
[Rutger Kopland appears at the 2009 Poetry International Festival. This text has been written for that occasion.]
