Poet
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Hester Knibbe 1946-... country: the Netherlands language: Dutch |
Een dunne duurzaamheid (‘A thin permanence’) is the title of one of Hester Knibbe’s latest collections. The title says much about this poet’s poetry: poetry in which the attention for things permanent invariably combines with themes like vulnerability, fragility, transience. Permanence, says Knibbe, is only appearance, in a sense, because all those things that seem to have stood the test of time - classic art, Greek mythology, Chinese temples - have not always remained the same: ‘Change has always been / here’. It is change, the motion of life, which Hester 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 Hester Knibbe has published seven 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.’ 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. Author: Mirjam van Hengel Translated by Ko Kooman Hester Knibbe (Netherlands, 1946) is a clinical pharmaceutical analyst. As a poet she made her début with her collection Tussen gebaren en woorden (‘Between gestures and words’) in 1982. She has since published five more collections, the latest of which, Antidood (1999) won her the prestigious Herman Gorter Prize. In 2001 she received the Anna Blaman Prize for her entire oeuvre. Hester Knibbe says she tries ‘to write as clearly as I can’ about ‘often very personal’ things, knowing that ‘the most personal is also the most universal’. Poets: |
