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In this selection of poetry, we go for a new direction. One that reflects the challenges, obsessions and fascinations of this complex 21st century.

New Dutch Poets

Employee

Employees

Victor Schiferli

Radna Fabias

Fabias was born on the island of Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean, and came to the Netherlands at the age of seventeen. Her poetry is rich with sensory detail, letting the reader see the blue of the sea and the pink and yellow of houses and churches in the Antilles. But if you immerse yourself in Fabias’ cinematic language, you also discover the other side of the idyll:‘the street kids on undersized bikes the way they dance their bikes around girls who have just started menstruating the mothers who warn about them the mothers only.’Fabias’ poetry examines the position of the migrant, shuttling between two worlds, in search of a home. This strongly composed collection looks at the fictions of her mother country and arriving at a new home, at people’s histories, mothers and fathers, but also at skin colour, stereotypes of exoticism and gender. Perhaps rather than a home, Fabias’ poetry is looking for a form of its own: the poems take on wildly divergent styles, at times reminiscent of ‘travel guides’ and theatre or film scripts, as in ‘view with a coconut (in soviet montage)’:‘the tropics paint orange-yellow a more intense orange-yellow but someone keeps calling and crying.’Fabias’ poetry gets deep under your skin; it’s sharp and visceral, exposing flesh, muscle, fear, and sensuality. It shows that identity is made up of a complex mixture of ingredients – of ‘faith, superstition, and (great) grandmotherly advice’, of experiences and preconceived notions. She cleverly plays with stereotypes and makes biting jokes:‘like many women I always knew I’d marry a man it ended up being a black man because that looked better with my dress a matter of contrast.’Fabias is already an essential voice in Dutch-language literature.

What transforms this into great poetry is its momentum and rhythm, the wealth of its images, and its nuanced vision on human existence.

Book

Poetry

Habitus

Radna Fabias (1983) spent years quietly working on her debut. When Habitus came out in early 2018, it was met with a flood of rave reviews, and Fabias wowed audiences at every poetry festival with her outstanding performance. The following year, the collection won virtually every Dutch and Flemish poetry award – from the C. Bud- dingh’ Prize for the best debut to the Herman de Coninck Prize and the Grote Poëzie Prijs. And rightly so, because Habitus is a truly bril- liant collection of poems about a woman caught between two worlds.

Lieke Marsman

But this essay is not just about being ill, it also delves deep into political issues that become personal. The book is a light-foot­ed rally against populism, against facile political assumptions about informal care and about the consequences of being ill.At first, twenty-seven-year-old Lieke Marsman’s shoulder pain was diagnosed as a repetitive strain injury, she was a writer after all. But when the pain finally became unbearable, scans revealed a malignant tumour: a rare form of cartilage cancer not usually found in younger people. Behind her right shoulder blade was a lump the size of a grapefruit. Mars-man went under the knife a week later. Tumour removed, cancer gone, problem solved – except that her existence had been turned upside down. She decided to write down her thoughts and observations in order to give shape to the chaos she was caught up in.Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag provided inspiration. In addition to accounts of their personal experiences, both books provide an analysis of the status of cancer and cancer patients in society, an approach Marsman also adopts.The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes is not merely introspective, it is also a plea to look around and assume one’s social responsibility in a sick society. This essay is about much more than just a young woman struggling with cancer, it addresses the meaning and consequences of illness in our modern neoliberal society.

Ten poems and an essay about cancer, for which Marsman was treated. But it also about so much more: about loneliness, being on benefits, economic sensationalism in culture, and freedom of expression.

A very personal text with a high degree of urgency. Every word strikes home.

Non-Fiction

De volgende scan duurt vijf minuten

In 'The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes' Lieke Marsman investigates through ten poems and an essay how a sick body relates to a sick world. ‘My little cancer book’ Marsman called it on Twitter.

The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes

Anne Vegter

Her inimitable language and the peculiar conceptual acrobatics were the striking features of her first two collections It Sprang (1991) and Shares and Obligations (2002).She once remarked in an interview: ‘I often find normal means of expression hopelessly exaggerated.’ In her case, her lyrical ego may leap from a stairway while observing, en passant, that a calendar is hanging askew. Elsewhere, someone is listening to Bach with a frown on the back of his head.In her third collection, Spamfighter (2008), her work became more serious and sedate, despite the ongoing turbulence in the language and the abundance of fantasy. Her unique mixture of a keyed-up overtone and a melancholy and fragile undertone is perfectly expressed in a line such as: ‘A ray of sunshine festively penetrates the windows of the clinic.’ Particularly her collection Island Mountain Glacier (2011) contains tributes and litanies to life and love. The capricious and rich joie de vivre that transcends the shadow side of domestic situations is assigned a darker hue, like a face that is enhanced by creases: ‘Your age scrubs your family coat’. Her apparent spontaneity in ‘showing and tripping’ – as her poems might sometimes be characterized – leans heavily on stringent selection: only the appropriate moment and the right words are allowed to participate in the performance.Public appreciation of her work is increasing over the years, which has provisionally culminated in her appointment as Poet Laureate for the Netherlands, the most public function that a poet in the Netherlands can fulfil.

Anne Vegter’s poetry has often been called surrealistic and dreamlike, and disturbing in equal measure.

Vegter writes daring, personal poetry that sometimes teases language to the limit. One time her poems may consist of complex chess configurations, whereas at other times the poet can be trite, incoherent or even vulgar. It all contributes to the stimulating, grating feeling that someone is getting too close to you.

With her turbulent style and extraordinary themes, Anne Vegter is one of the most prominent poets in present-day Dutch literature.

The poetry of Anne Vegter

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