Belgium's leading poet for many decades, Herman de Coninck has never been translated into English and collected in a single extended volume until now. Witty, tender, wise, de Coninck's poems range from playful, terse love lyrics to darkly ironic, somberly truthful observations about human experience. The ability to compress huge subjects into small, formally sculpted poems is a hallmark of his style; conversely, what might seem too small to write about is often transformed by his imagination into the very essence of things.
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The Belgian Dutch poet de Coninck (1944-97) was a miniaturist. Few poems in this first English-language selection are longer than a sonnet--a form he loved, incidentally, because it has so often been used to express amative and erotic love. Unsurprisingly, de Coninck was a poet of love. The early poems here are even more concise and more concerned with the act of love than all but the sexiest formal sonnets, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay's, which de Coninck adored. De Coninck manages to be both graphically intimate and lovingly tender in such poems. Later he turned to pain and endurance, both those of a nation reeling from two brutal invasions in the 30 years before de Coninck was born and those of a man who has personally loved and lost most brutally--de Coninck's first wife died in 1971 in a car crash in which he and their child were also involved. Still later poems return to love, for everything else the poet has learned to adore. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From the Publisher
"Reading this book, I was amazed again and again by the skill of Bosselaar and Brown. They are both fine poets in their own right and that helps a great deal. They make it hard to imagine that these strange, original, and absolutely fabulous poems were written in any other language but English."
--Charles Simic, from the Foreword
--Charles Simic, from the Foreword
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