Welcome to Dutch poetry - September 2004

 

 

Last June, at the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, no less than nine Dutch poets were present and performing: Mark Boog, Lloyd Haft, Rutger Kopland, Ramsey Nasr, Tonnus Oosterhoff, Willem Jan Otten, Kees Ouwens, Hagar Peeters and Hans Tentije.

With this new September issue we proudly present six of them as new poets on the Dutch site. In previous issues, we already drew your attention to the poetry of Rutger Kopland and Tonnus Oosterhoff. Willem Jan Otten was already partly present, but now some new translations of his work have been added.

The six new poets were either born in the forties or the seventies of the twentieth century. Mark Boog (1970), Hagar Peeters (1972) and Ramsey Nasr (1974) are among the most promising younger poets in the Netherlands, each having published two or three volumes of poetry, which were all warmly greeted by both critics and readers.

Hans Tentije (1944) and Lloyd Haft (1946) have been around a bit longer. Tentije’s first book of poetry, Alles is er (Everything is here), was published in 1975 and twenty-eight years later he published his eighth, Wat het licht doet (What the light does). Haft, a Dutch American who lives in the Netherlands since 1968, is a sinologist and a well-know translator of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, W.C. Williams and many others. His most recent book of poetry, De Psalmen (The psalms; 2003), was awarded the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize 2004.

Kees Ouwens (1944) made his debut in 1968 and since then developed a particularly distinctive tone and style. The fascinating evolution of his work becomes apparent in the recently published collection of his volumes, Alle gedichten tot dusver (All poems to date; 2003). Sadly, his performance at the Poetry International festival has turned out to be the last time Ouwens read in public: he died last week, on August 24th .

With these six new poets we hope to give you much to read and think about. We also hope it will make your view on the Dutch landscape of poetry a more vivid and varied one. Our next issue, appearing on December 1, will feature a sometimes neglected, but very special part of that same landscape: Frisian poetry.

© Thomas Möhlmann  
 
 

 
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