Booklist
In this dual-language edition, Afrikaans novelist Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel laureate in literature, introduces and translates one poem each by five twentieth-century Dutch poets and three by a sixth. His choices all have the capacity to pique poetry readers' interest in more by these striking, thoroughly European modernists. Coetzee says that Gerrit Achterberg's "Ballad of the Gasfitter" expresses the myth of Orpheus; certainly it contains death, resurrection, and second death within a workaday urban setting. Sybren Polet's "Self-Repeating Poem" is a strident 1960s protest, much more artful than most. Hugo Claus' "Ten Ways of Looking at P. B. Shelley" dissects an earlier radical poet in the manner, paradoxically enough, of Wallace Stevens. Cees Nooteboom's "Basho" follows the peripatetic Japanese as "through him the landscape is turned into words." Rutger Kopland's "Descent in Broad Daylight," even more repetitive than Polet's piece, questions the senses and whether the mind can ever apprehend natural reality. The three poems by Hans Faverey are paradoxical, abstract, the most engaging pieces in this enjoyably challenging little sampler. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Dan Chiasson, Poetry
"Reading this book is a little like discovering Modernism on pottery shards or having it beamed down by satellites".
