And the C. Buddingh' Prize goes to... (#PIFR)

Who will go home tonight with the C. Buddingh' Prize, the award for the best Dutch-language poetry debut of the past year? That will be announced tonight at Poetry International. A Quattro Mani makes a prediction.

Close to home

Contenders are Mathijs Gomperts with Six, Jonathan Griffin with District, Sebastiene Postma with her bundle Stairs and Marieke Rijneveld with Calfskin.

The four were left out of a pile of 21 books of poetry. According to the judges, Joke van Leeuwen, Arjan Peters and Nachoem Wijnberg, most poets stayed too close to home. 'Personal memories or emotions are worked up into poems, mostly missing things like experimentation in form or the power of musicality in a text. This somewhat bleak picture certainly does not apply to the four debutants nominated, who, precisely through subject choices, form or a combination of the two, elude the poetic timidity of the latest generation of poets.'

Three of the four nominated collections, by the way, do deal with memories of a childhood, but in a more idiosyncratic way. Thus Mathijs Gomperts (1988) in Six chose the perspective of a 6-year-old boy (although the words don't always fit that), and describes the world and experiences to match:

 

The bath is big enough for all of us

also for the whale

holding open the well with its tail

If you start looking like an old man

 

we are in a sarcophagus together,

smooth as porcelain on your bottom

 

I at the foot end,

Between daddy's feet that are like palms

sticking out of the water

 

They are intimate, sometimes melancholic musings; the description of a world in which not much shocking is happening yet. That is also a bit of a downside of the collection, which is beautiful but nowhere really surprising.

At District describes Jonathan Griffin (1987) the growing up of an adolescent in Wijk bij Duurstede. The ingredients of an adolescent life are already a bit spicier, because in Wijk there are also shady dealings and drugs, or people excluded:

 

for Jews no place in Wijk.

those who wear yarmulkes

 

is picked from the fairground

And outside the village from the boot.

we stand with sticky hand bowls

around the big boys.

 

we are not a mother's womb, the meadows

around us no soft hands.

 

it rains fistfuls of bumper car tokens.

Completely different is the bundle Stairs from Sebastiene Postma (1957). No youth, no personal memories, but essayistic verses dealing with English poetry, Romanticism. Postma introduces well-known poets and writers, such as Coleridge, Eliot and Milton, and uses their biography for inspiration. Each contribution in the collection is structured according to a set pattern and contains at least once the image of a staircase, which plays a role in several meanings: as a shovel, a ladder, a step, a fall. Tied together in a tight framework, tradition and resistance form a single entity.

 

Crane thought: waste land?

No, no, he is dead wrong.

What jerk doesn't see the lust,

wanting to grab it out of horniness.

Hot kicking,

reach out.

Tree to tree, landing to landing.

Surely you see the eruption AND overwhelm?

For crane, getting ready and drowning were

same. One word was an ejaculation

In which you drowned. He jumped

When he was thirty-two in the Gulf

of Mexico overboard, after overnight

in a drunken state by a sailor

to have been mistreated. He always picked the wrong

To put forward an obscene proposal.

The body was never found.

(...)

The chain carries to the other side by riveting.

This is it? the rapture for which the time and again drown?

 

What Postma does is absolutely extraordinary; she reaches beyond the small, the personal, and that is commendable. At the same time, her erudite prose poems also have something distant, making them interesting rather than seductive or transporting. Stairs As a result, while it is a remarkable collection, it is not one that leaves you breathless, moved or in wonder.

That does Marieke Rijneveld (1991) though in her collection Calfskin. She is not only the youngest of the nominees, but also the one with the most bravado. The verses in Calfskin, poems that are close to prose in form and word density, yet can be nothing but poetry in their visual language and poetic eloquence, have an overwhelming effect and display a suppleness in language and metaphors not often encountered. Reminiscent of that of her Flemish colleague Delphine Lecompte, her work is unmistakably her own and original. With her, growing up on a farm, family life and all that goes with it become an adventure, with men folding their children into aeroplanes for the first time, eyes like mozzarella balls and people like milk pans.

 

Our cavities in the mattress are like scrapes that heal on their own

as if it should remain a mystery who is resting there last night

laid with arms wrapped around knees like a bombshell on dry land.

 

Every morning you leave the bathroom fogged up and I get to shower

in your misty awakening, you shave my legs in the morning light with a

silver knife that keeps going from bottom to top just like our conversations.

 

Recently, I started playing with lego again to visualise my longing, to express myself

hide behind a bigger plan while I want nothing more than to build without

masonry urge; you see a child in everything but how do you make a wall when

cement is missing or if the white strips on my legs are not roads but

insertion lanes, if I'm not fast enough I won't get between them.

 Rijneveld's phrasing is original, rich, inviting and challenging, doing exactly what good poetry knows how to do: it makes language new. Rijneveld achieves a high level in this debut, which makes one curious to see what else to expect from this young poet. It is almost inevitable that Marieke Rijneveld will go home with the C. Buddingh' Prize tonight.