Engels

Instead of Silence


	LA VALLÉE FRANÇAISE (2) when we head home from our walk and find what was always there the bread on the table the fireplace still warm the beds made then we have been lucky for in this place men have been ambushed women tied up and children abducted in this place soup stood for days getting cold and feathers drifted like snow out through broken windows

Review
by Kirk Ridgeway

Miriam Van hee, a well-known contemporary Flemish poet, is also known for her extensive translations of Russian poetry. While many of her own poems have been translated into other languages, this is the first English translation as interpreted by Judith Wilkinson in collaboration with the poet. The collection's scope of inward and outward facing poetry assures that the reader will discover poems of great resonance.

A most striking characteristic of Miriam Van hee's poetry is precision of her word- images that are acutely tangible. (" you look at her//the way a child looks//at the first snowfall//you touched her//carefully, like a blind man "). Her images evoke the reader's own experiences of time, place, and circumstance upon which she adds her own to reveal and affirm the universality of human experience. The clarity of her writing, along with the disarmingly sparse structure and language of her poems, leads us to readily join our story with her story through the power of the imagination. As in all poems, the intensity of emotional identification is necessarily dependent on what the reader brings to the reading.

Reading the introduction by the translator is a good first step. She provides a concise overview of the body of work and some relevant history of the poet. The poems themselves are written with minimal punctuation, devoid of capitalization except for "I," and many have no titles. This style results in the necessity of the reader to slow down and engage fully each line in order to access the depth and quality of her poetry, especially on the first reading.