An English Anthology

Leonard Nolens, Paul Vincent

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784105747
• eBook ISBN: 9781784105754
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

'I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity.

Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. 'We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight', he writes in the selection's central sequence 'Breach'.

Nolens' poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• from Two Forms of Silence (1975)
• from Legacy
• from Incantation (1977)
• from All the Time in the World. A Form of Poetics (1979)
• from Homage (1981)
• from Vertigo (1983)
• from The Dreamed Figure (1986)
• From Birth Certificate (1988)
• from Love’s Declarations (1990)
• from Honey and Ash (1994)
• from And Vanish in Moderation (1996)
• from Passer-By (1999)
• from Ways of Life (2001)
• from Breach (2007)
• from Desertology (2008)
• from Tell the Children We’re No Good (2011)
• Translator’s Note
• Copyright