A Public Woman

Poetry. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. "For this book I have chosen poems that 'travel' easily. Having lived all over the place and being married to a girl from New York City, my poems inevitably ponder on questions of identity, home, language etc. I try to 'do the police in different voices', which is why half of this book is taken up by the voice of an imaginary 'public woman', an actress who wants to share her rather tumultuous twentieth-century life with us. I am very indebted to the translator, David Colmer, with whom I have collaborated for almost twenty years."—Benno Barnard