An English Anthology

The Antwerp-based poet Leonard Nolens (born in 1947) once claimed to be more interested in his "poetic identity" than in biography. His curriculum vitae should consist of his name and the thousand or so poems last collected in 2011 as Manieren van leven (Ways of Life). Any suggestion that we are dealing with an unworldly recluse is dispelled by the sparkle of his voluminous Dagboek van een dichter (Poet's Diary), where he engages vigorously with people, art, ideas and the world around him. An English Anthology is evidence of how his poetry is at once musical, communicating with the reader's "listening eye," plastic, narrative and reflective. This will be the first time a collection of Leonard Nolens' work has been translated into English.

'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 first person 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, Val ry, Neruda, Mandelstam, and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.

The Belgian diarist and love poet Leonard Nolens invents selves to escape self.