NACHOEM M. WIJNBERG

Translated by David Colmer Paperback • $18.00

“Nachoem Wijnberg is a free-standing mountain in the sloping hills of Dutch poetry; a relentless innovator who has created a gorgeous oeuvre. Am I making him bigger than defensible? You can find out for yourself. David Colmer has translated more than one hundred and seventy poems. It is an irresistibly enticing collection to read, read again and cherish.” —*Neerlandistiek: An Online Journal for Language and Literature

The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive and up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation.

This new selection of poems constitutes an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies— hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition.

His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart.

“Wijnberg is a thrilling phenomenon in contemporary European poetry—his huge stylistic and intellectual range is matched by an exquisite sense of play and the kind of deep strangeness that, like Pessoa’s, is open to all comers. David Colmer performs an enormous service in making available to English-language readers the full scope of this Dutch poet’s philosophical investigations in translations of great lucidity and lyrical power.” —Alissa Valles

“In a remarkably lucid and refined translation by David Colmer, this collection brings together a generous selection of poems from Wijnberg’s twenty volumes of poetry published to date.”*