Neeltje Maria Min

“I’ve lost what was: 
context, order, place. 
Everything I encountered 
while exploring last night 
took me further from home. 
The longer I look back,  
the tighter the knot in time.” 

_{- from: The house remembers me} 

Neeltje Maria Min is a Dutch poet. 

After first choosing to publish her poetry under the pseudonym Sophie Perk, she first published some of her poems under her own name in literary magazines De Gids and Maatstaf at the age of 19. Two years later, her debut poetry collection Voor wie ik liefheb wil ik heten (1966) was published. The poems in her debut beautifully depict the realities of love and death and the relationship between parent and child. The book was a great success that took the Dutch literary scene by storm. Nonetheless, her second publication, the poetry book Een vrouw bezoeken appeared an astounding 19 years later in 1985. In Een vrouw bezoeken the romanticism of her earlier work makes way for fierce irony, although her work is still oft-autobiographical and visits the same themes of relationships between family members and the experience of love and grief. Since then, Neeltje Maria Min has published five more poetry books, with her fifth publication Kindsbeen (1995) standing out particularly.