Poetry International Poetry International
Article

Editorial: 1 February 2011

January 24, 2011
Our first issue of February features poets chosen by our Belgian and Colombian editors.
Patrick Peeters recently took over from Tom Van de Voorde as editor of the PIW Belgium domain. To introduce himself, and his poetry tastes, to PIW’s readership, we invited him to compile an archive tour of some of his favourite poetry on PIW. Beginning with Michael Palmer’s ‘Azur’ and ending with Erik Spinoy’s ‘Wolf’, this tour moves between poems via linguistic and cognitive associations. Read more about it here.

This issue, Patrick Peeters presents Belgian poet Christine D’haen (1923–2009), who was the first female poet to win, in 1992, the most prestigious literary prize of the Dutch-speaking world, the Prize for Dutch Literature. D’haen was a lover and connoisseur of English literature, and she translated poetry by Flemish Guido Gezelle into English; she was also curator of the Guido Gezelle Museum. D’haen embraced tight forms and rhythms, yet experimented within their parameters, through techniques such as unexpected enjambement, assonance and semantic ambiguities. As seen through the selection of poems here, she also wrote poems in free verse. The gorgeous ‘Yom Ehad’, translated into English by the poet herself, is a stunning example of the rhythmic energy and breath-taking imagery she achieved in such poems.

D’haen’s preferred form of poetry was the elegy, and in the poems published here, the relationship between poetry and death is a recurring theme. ‘Dodecahedron’, the first poem in a series of twelve douzains, for instance, begins “When Time was, we sat and talked, so long as time was; / about death.” A little later in the poem, the structure is mimicked:
“When Time was, we sat, so happily, and talked / about the poem”. For D’haen, it seems, poetry is not so much, in its endurance, a counterweight to death (though indeed her tightly wrought poems will outlast human lifespans), but a means of reflecting on and asserting the strangeness of “life /once so unforgettably rife – / which I possess, and from you departs.” (from ‘Twelve Epitaphs for Kira Van Kasteel’).

PIW Colombia presents Alberto Vélez, who works as a judge, and, who, over the last thirty or so years, has published just three slim books of poetry. The poems featured here include ‘The Guamo Tree’, which his biographer describes as “one of the most beautiful poems written in Colombia in the second half of the twentieth century”. In this poem, a celebration of those small moments that bring sudden recognition of “the florescence of life”, he posits a holistic view of being and death – both are the effects of “Time, which is everything. / It joins us by parting us.”

Our final poet of this issue, Colombian Gloria Posada, is a polymath whose studies include anthropology, plastic arts, aesthetics and historical and natural heritage. Her prize-winning poetry, published on PIW with audio recordings, is sparse and airy, leaning into silence. Elemental imagery and elliptical syntax are characteristic of the poems published here – “Water drops / are no longer cloud / Fruits and leaves / are not tree / Petals are not rose”, she writes in ‘Duration’, encapsulating in just a few simple words the flux of everything around us. Like D’haen and Vélez, she too contemplates the passing of time through her poetry, documenting the constant variations of nature. “They say [. . .] that deserts blossom / to become sand again weeks later // that birds are the first to arrive / at a new island // that the serpent’s skin changes / and remains in the mud / while the body glides”.

A finished poem, of course, unlike the natural world, or its readers, remains immutable. Perhaps this is of comfort in February, the shortest month of the year, when the sands of time appear to run a little faster ?
© Sarah Ream
Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Prins Bernhard cultuurfonds
Lira fonds
Versopolis
J.E. Jurriaanse
Gefinancierd door de Europese Unie
Elise Mathilde Fonds
Stichting Verzameling van Wijngaarden-Boot
Veerhuis
VDM
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère