TOP THREE

'It's really starting to become something with me now anyway,' poems Vrouwkje Tuinman with healthy self-irony in the collection Lijfrente. In her case, you could say that - Lijfrente won the Great Poetry Prize last year.

It's a nice rule, well suited to mumble to yourself on occasion. Too inappropriate is the most fun: your annual loan fee turns out to be enough for half a cappuccino, in the dressing room there are no less than two mini bars in a large fruit bowl waiting for you, the local celebrity has waltzed past his time before the break so extensively that the organisation asks a minute before your performance if you can do it in half the time as well.

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I would make a top three of last year's poetry collections for the unsurpassed magazine Awater. All contributors to the magazine do that, and so you get a nice annual review.

It's really starting to become something with me now, I thought.

I am rarely asked to make a top three of anything. Until now, I wrote one literary review in my life, in the association journal of my General Literature studies, about a fellow student's self-published debut. I considered myself quite something at nineteen, so it became a haughty write-off. To my surprise, my yearmates all reacted the same way: what did you actually put yourself down for bringing down a fellow student? I sputtered and muttered some more, but the answer was obvious. Thus, thank God, a literary reviewer was lost to me.

For a few days I broke my head over my top three. How do you make such a choice, why, and what do you express with it? Your literacy, your non-conformism, your tendency towards nepotism or lip service? Shyly, I handed in my list. It includes two debuts I enjoyed. Plus a personal favourite that I fear others might forget, which I also chose a bit to thank the poet for another book.

Beyond that, of course, such a collection of lists makes no sense. We are saying something about ourselves, not about poetry. Probably soon three poets, when they get to see my choice, will think the same thing: 'Surely it's really starting to be something about me...'.