Poetry – dad breathes waves – culture

“The cow! The rooster! The pig!” The writer Brigitte Kronauer once started a short text about her childhood love for animals. And with the consistently used exclamation marks, she also makes it clear in language what the animals meant to her as a child. They were something constant in the fuzziness of the child’s sensory impressions, “supporting pillars of reality”, as Kronauer writes.

Maybe that’s why the Dutch children’s book author Milja Praagman has provided her volume of poetry with lots of animal drawings. The animals, sometimes simplified like silhouettes, convey an atmosphere of calm and balance. The poems can also be read without thinking about animals. The theme “Together”, which gives the book its title, is open enough to accommodate all the happiness of being together, often tied to the idea of ​​family, from the baby in mom’s womb to grandmother’s experiences. And it also includes the opposite of calm and balance: breaks in relationships, for example, or experiences of pain: “Sorrow comes like a downpour. / Like a ten-strong storm. / So that you think / it will never go away.”

The cow, the rooster or the pig do not appear in the poems. It’s more like polar bears, whales, swans or penguins that we meet, just like many poems have to do with water, sometimes in a liquid, sometimes in a frozen state. Water as the element that connects everything at first glance, on which one can float or glide, but also as something that separates continents, that is a border or an obstacle or a surface on which people try to escape. Praagman captures such contexts casually and gives her verses, which otherwise seem almost timeless, a clear reference to the present and a political tinge: “Eight years of life in my luggage, / a shoebox, three uncles. / Home is far away for him, / but hope is his companion.”

Even if terms like “home” are not questioned enough and the didactic orientation sometimes pushes itself to the fore, there are always beautiful pictures to discover: “Dad breathes waves, / in and out, constantly. / My quiet ocean – / the most beautiful place.” However, Dad’s breathing rate is a little restless here. Is the slightly bumpy meter due to the translation or is it already in the Dutch text? In any case, Eva Schweikart has made an effort to find intensive solutions for the rhymes as well, “Hauseingang” rhymes with “seconds long” and “alone” with “super fine”. So you can only end with a super fine quote that puts you in a good mood: “A cheerful ‘Hello! for everyone / is not appropriate in the city. / I’ll keep doing it anyway / because someone laughed at me today.” (from 8 years)

Open detailed view