Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Poetry does not make the dead rise,
lie down again, rise again,
but sometimes it makes the rising rise. […]
In poems selected from 20 collections and translated by David Colmer, the Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg finds that poetry doesn’t perform miracles, like raising the dead, but traces the motions of life, the sudden “rise in the water” that steers a ship, a revolution’s “uprising,” the “rise and fall” of rhyme, or each day’s rising into consciousness, because “dear poets, it is time / for what you say every morning, / meaning: for the rising.”
Wijnberg’s style is misleadingly direct, employing the technique of “making strange”—“Saying how this is, / without saying what this is”—to turn various subjects into something captivatingly real yet dreamlike:
When the Messiah comes
someone will have to convince him he’s the Messiah
and that someone can’t be a Jew,
because Jews who hear that the Messiah has comehave to carry on
with whatever they’re doing.[…]
Wijnberg believes this defamiliarization of reality may be a condition of Dutch poetry itself, which “starts with searching / for where one dream ends / and the next begins.” In “Psalm 22,” the speaker suggests that the purpose is not entertainment but a kind of compassionate distraction:
A horse is drowning at the bottom of the waterfall,
my face is half covered with blood.
Does listening to me not distract you
from your sure and ongoing loss?
Over time Wijnberg’s style has grown knottier, perhaps more compassionately “distracting,” as he traces an inward journey through lifelong, accreted understandings of his best subjects, love, meaning, mortality, poetry itself:
[…] Do I already know
a way of carrying on
writing poems when I am no longer as good at remembering
what I read yesterday that made me rise to my feet
before I noticed what I was doing? When it gets quiet
and I look at a clock (someone’s watch,
on their wrist) and remember: this is the hour
when what I’ve forgotten
the beginning of ends. […]