"At Home"
from Hugo Claus's
Greetings: Selected Poems
translated from the Dutch by John Irons

Hugo Claus:

Hugo Claus was born in Bruges, Belgium, in 1929. He is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the Belgian State Prize, which he won six times; the Constantijn Huygens Prize, which is given in honor of a writer’s entire body of work; and the State Prize for Dutch Letters. He lives in Antwerp. (Photo by Gerald Dauphin)

John Irons:

John Irons is a noted translator of Dutch poetry. He studied modern languages at Cambridge and lives in the Danish city of Odense.

About Greetings: Selected Poems:

Hugo Claus has been a leading figure in postwar European literature for many years. Acclaimed for his novel about wartime Flanders, The Sorrow of Belgium, he is also a painter, playwright, essayist, and poet. And it is of the writing of poetry that he has said, “It is the most mysterious, disturbing, and adventurous experience I know.”

From a poem about the soul to a poem about a toy train, to a passionate series of love lyrics to a set of notes for Genesis, Claus shows remarkable range. He remains attentive to the unusual image and the unfamiliar sound: “Your words come with the crooked walk / Of the tortoise up to me,” he writes in “A Rendevous”; and then, “Day sits in its cage, / And I sit in my shirt” in “Exercises.”

In his fifty years of work, Claus has continually redefined the avant-garde, challenging sexual, political, and artistic taboos. And here, at last in English, is a collection of poems from the past five decades that serves as an invaluable introduction to this major poet.

"From the beginning, [Hugo Claus's] poetry has been marked by an uncommon mix of intelligence and passion, given expression in a medium over which he has such light-fingered control that art becomes invisible... [Here] are poems whose verbal concentration, intensity of feeling, and intellectual range place their author in the first rank of European poets of the late twentieth century."
— J. M. Coetzee

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