Hanny Michaelis

Since the publication of her memoirs, there has been renewed interest in her life. As the daughter of Jewish parents who died in Sobibor, Michaelis was confronted with loss and devastation at an early age, and these themes are inherent in much of her poetry. Her difficult marriage to the well-known Dutch novelist Gerard Reve, and the tragic death of her second partner, undoubtedly account for the mournful note of much of her love poetry. 

In fact in some of her poems there is even a defeatist, tired quality, a sense that life, inevitably and repetitively, brings loss and disillusionment. Michaelis’ range is not vast, moreover, and her vision not infused with immense variety and invention. And yet, arguably, in her best work, there is a toughness, an ability to re-inhabit an experience without sentimentality, that can lend her short, focused poems a curious strength. Bibliography

Poetry
In Dutch: 
Water uit de rots, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1957
Tegen de wind in, Van Oorschot, 1962
Onvoorzien, Van Oorschot, 1966
De rots van Gibraltar, Van Oorschot, 1969
Wegdraven naar een nieuw Utopia, Van Oorschot, 1971
Een keuze uit haar gedichten door J.J. Voskuil, Van Oorschot, 2005
Nagelaten gedichten, Van Oorschot, 2007
Zonder een spoor van vrede (with photos by Michèle Baudet), Van Oorschot 2008
Verzamelde Gedichen, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1996 & 2000
Oorlogsdagboek 1940-1945, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2019

In English:
In an Unguarded Moment, trs Judith Wilkinson, LanguageandCulture.net, 2005