Cees Nooteboom is best known in the English-speaking world for his acclaimed novels, essays, and travel writing; however, Nooteboom has always seen himself first and foremost as a poet. He has said, “without poetry my life would be unthinkable.”
The poems in Light Everywhere are presented in reverse chronological order, reflecting the poet’s contemporary perspective on the productivity of more than half a century. The anthology covers his poetic output up to 2013, with an emphasis on his more recent work. New translations of older poems are crafted by award-winning translator David Colmer, lending a consistent voice to the whole collection.
When Nooteboom began writing poetry in the Netherlands in 1956, he was considered an outcast for not abiding by the conventional experimental style popular at the time. Instead, he took to learning from poets abroad, translating work by Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, and Pablo Neruda. Nooteboom’s work is lucid and mysterious, evocative and elusive, and it is fitting that the collection begins and ends with poems of travel, moving back in time from an elderly man’s entanglement and resignation to the detachment and harsh light of youth, with everything in between.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Light Everywhere (2012)
Light Everywhere:
Lifelines
Evening
The figure
Trixy
Penobscot
Exile
Night
It
Kozan-ji, myoe meditating
April auf dem lande
The candle
Purgatory
Without an image
Riso amaro
Horace to pollio in 2005
Glove, year, photo
Outside
Recognition
Utopia triumphans
Landscape
Raison d’etre
A trail in white sand
Encounters:
Juarroz
Wittgenstein
Hesiod
Meng Jiao
Shelley
Borges
Descartes
Virgil, fifth eclogue
Ungaretti
Wallace Stevens
Parlando:
Poem
Occasional Poems:
Stolen poem
Poet
Post restante
Bittersweet (2000)
Bittersweet
Picasso, late etchings
Spring
Amsterdam, 1200
Paula Modersohn-Becker, still life, 1905
Fairy tale
The poet Li Ho finds an arrow on the battlefield
Summer
Rilke, painted by Paul Modersohn-Becker, 1906
Distortion
The first photo of god
Solanum dulcamara
Autumn
Noche transfigurada
It Could Be Like That (1999)
Self
Post
Latin
Eye Sight (1989)
Bashō
The Poet and Things:
Lucretius
Duality
Fire
Atoms
Mirror, reflect
Justice culinaire
Eye Sight:
The deception of seeing
What there was to see
The inner eye
The litany of the eye
The Eye’s Sights:
Silesius dreams
Cauda
Paesaggi Narrati (The Landscape Tells the Story) (1982)
Empty quarter
Altiplano
Bait (1982)
Nerval
Elko, Nevada
Snow
Bogotá
Manáos
Traveler
Fin de saison
Cliff
Rock plant
Tree
Scholasticism
Fuji
Friend
Open Like a Shell, Closed Like a Stone (1978)
Rolling stone
Birthday
Nobody
Cries and whispers
Afternoon
Suitcase
Hotels
Last letter
Trainers and leather-dyers, Marrakesh
The death of Aegeus
Homer on Ithaca
Those were the days
The thought
Present, Absent (1970)
Poseidon and Amphitrite, Villa Stabia, Pompeii
The green hunter
T.
Athena, on an aphora painted by Psiax (Brescia)
Nothing at all
Closed Poems (1964)
A rainy part of the country
Golden fiction
The Black Poem (1960)
Jungle
M’hamid, tagounite
Calera y chozas
Notes
Translator’s acknowledgements