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A Still Life: Selected Poems (1960-2010)
Bernlef and Scott Rollins (Translator)
Guernica Editions, Spring 2016
100 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771831086
ISBN10: 1771831081
English
Translated from the Dutch
$12.00 Canada, $12.00 US
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His poems make you forget what poetry is. Bernlef's secret is in the way he looks at things. His attention to the ordinary, to the marginal, the so-called extra literary has not only enlarged the realm of the poetic but challenges the hierarchies and preconceived notions about what is or is not considered literary. -- Dutch critic Hans Kloos
I embrace the words like smoke
light and carefree
not because I love them
but because they're in my way
and no avoiding it.
With my nose pressed against a word
the typesetting comes loose
and I get entangled in the moustaches
and beards of words.
His poetry, unemphatic but precise, is concerned with everyday details and what lies behind them, with the workings of observation, memory and mind and with the way language shapes experience.
Theo Hermans, professor and editor
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