Monk's Eye

Cees Nooteboom

Translated by David Colmer

Illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee

Forthcoming

 

5 x 8.5 inches, 72 pp, 33 colour plates July 2018

ISBN : 9780857425478

Rs  499.00 (HB)
$19.00 (HB)
£12.99 (HB)

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Made up of 33 poems that can be read separately or as a single series about a poet's life, Cees Nooteboom began writing Monk's Eye on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and completed the series on the Spanish island of Minorca, which has been his summer home for decades now. The poems are about both these islands, but also about an archetypal island and the serenity you can find in dunes and on beaches, with the sea all around. Classical and Oriental at once, they are about the past, memories, illusions, dreams and the essence of all poetry. In the first line of the Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks him: 'My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?'

Cees Nooteboom is the author of A Song of Truth and Semblance, All Souls’ Day and The Following Story, among other books.

 

 

David Colmer has won several translation awards, most notably the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2009 New South Wales Premier’s Prize and PEN Award for his body of work.

Poetry