Henk van der Waal

On the surface, Van der Waal’s poems often appear to be like fretwork. Diamond-shaped, funnelling downwards with diminishing lines, or upwards with increasingly long lines, in blocks, or on one occasion as an ‘undercarriage’, with two lines pushing forwards round central bars. Within that fixed form, his language teems. For van der Waal, writing would seem to be an engagement, an incantation. Spiritedly, blissfully, he throws himself into the fray. Dutch critic Piet Gerbrandy wrote: “the poems are objects that via their visual space radiate a certain inaccessibility: they are there, and that is perhaps even more important than the fact that they can mean all sorts of things.” 

For his debut collection, Henk van der Waal was awarded the C. Buddingh’-prijs. In that collection, the poet addresses one newly born: “you realise/ of course that where we promise you solid ground/ and beacons// there is a quagmire of/ sprawling language in which/ you cannot swim, nor yet walk on.” The mistrusting of the language that is the poet’s material is characteristic. He operates on ground that is on fire.

Despite this, what Van der Waal provides in his poetry is not a hopeless exercise, one where the author is left out of account. It is his intensity which ensures that his work reverberates, sinks in and remains personal. Literary critic Koen Vergeer wrote the following about the collection De aantochtster (The Woman Approaching): “This collection is so rich, so full of ideas, marvellous long sentences, rhythm, pathos, incantation.” 

Henk van der Waal studied medicine and subsequently philosophy. He has worked as a journalist and translator. He teaches in the Image and Language Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In his essays, he explores the nature of poetry, its urgency and what it is capable of. In doing so, he makes frequent references to such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Julia Kristeva and Alain Badiou. His most recent collection Vreemdgang (Unfaithfulness) appeared in 2007. Bibliography

Poetry
De windsels van de sfinx, Querido, Amsterdam, 1995
Schuldsanering, Querido, Amsterdam, 2000
De aantochtster, Querido, Amsterdam, 2003
Vreemdgang, Querido, Amsterdam, 2007
De kunst van het dichten, Querido, Amsterdam, 2009
Zelf Worden, Querido, Amsterdam, 2010
Denken op de plaats rust, Querido, Amsterdam, 2012
Windsels van de sfinx, Querido, Amsterdam, 2013
In de ogen van de god, Querido, Amsterdam, 2014
Mystiek voor goddelozen, Querido, Amsterdam, 2017
Door alle honderd harten wit te kalken, Querido, Amsterdam, 2018
De uitbraak, Querido, Amsterdam, 2020

Published translations
In: Poésie néerlandaise d'aujourd'hui (French, Morocco), translated by Jan H. Mysjkin and Pierre Gallissaires. In: Electron libre: revue de poésie, number 2, 2005.
In: Le verre est un liquide lent: 33 poètes néerlandais (French, anthology) translated by Joke J. Hermsen et al. Farrago, 2003.
In: Poètes néerlandais, aujourd'hui (French), translated by Jan H. Mysjkin and Pierre Gallissaires. In: Action Poétique, number 156, 1999.
In: The low countries 5 (English), translated by Paul Vincent et al. Ons Erfdeel, 1997.

Links

In Dutch:
Van der Waal’s own Website
Van der Waal Interviewed by Dutch critic Remco Ekkers.