Hester Knibbe

It is change, the motion of life, which Knibbe tries to come to grips with in her poetry. Not to understand it unequivocally, but to probe it, give it a form by which to get hold of it. Her subjects may be foreign, distant, or highly intimate, as in the incisive cycle ‘Antidood’ (Antideath), about a mother whose son falls seriously ill. A perilous subject for someone inclined to the pathetic, but not for Knibbe, who knows how to transform it into strong, unsentimental poetry. She keeps her distance, finds images that represent the actual events as well as her personal experience of them. Emotions are expressed in subtle, mostly indirect ways, as in a moving dream about a small child which, warmly wrapped up and firmly held, slowly freezes – ‘a film of ice / coated its eyes, its mouth. I cried out’.

Since 1982, Knibbe has published a dozen volumes of poetry. In 2001 she received the Anna Blaman Prize for her work. The jury report emphasized the development that is so apparent in this oeuvre: a development ‘from tentative, groping poems to an effective, surefooted poetry which stands as if it has always been here.’ In 2015, her collection Archaïsch de dieren (Archaic the animals) won the top Dutch-language poetry prize, the VSB Poetry Prize; she was also appointed as the Rotterdam City Poet Laureate.

Comparing the poems from her earliest collections, Tussen gebaren en woorden (Between gestures and words) and Meisje in badpak (Girl in a bathing suit) with those in the latest volume, we find much similarity, especially in form – frequent use of internal rhyme and enjambment, flowing rhythm – but a striking difference as well. Bibliography

Poetry
Tussen gebaren en woorden, Rotterdamse Kunststichting, 1982
Meisje in badpak, De Prom, 1992
Een hemd van vlees, De Prom, 1994 (VSB Poetry Prize nominee)
Een bittere navel, De Prom, 1997
Een dunne duurzaamheid, De Prom, 1999
Mijn onverwisselbare kop, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, 2001 (published via the Anna Blaman Prize)
Verstoorde grond, De Prom, Baarn, 2002
De buigzaamheid van steen, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2005
Bedrieglijke dagen, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2008
Oogsteen, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2009 (selected poems from 1982-2008)
Het hebben van schaduw, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2011
Archaïsch de dieren, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2014 VSB Poetry Prize winner)
Requiem voor een stad, Stadsditchter, Rotterdam, 2015
Vierkant, Atlanta Pers, Baarn, 2016
Dit, De Athlea Pers, 's Gravenhage, 2016
As, Vuur, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2017
Inzake dit huis, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2020

In English
Hungerpots, trans. Jacquelyn Pope, Eyewear Publishing, London, 2015

Links
Knibbe's poems in Poetry Magazine (translated into English by Jacquelyn Pope)


This text was written on the occasion of Hester Knibbe participating in the 2002 Poetry International Festival and has subsequently been updated.