Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar by Menno Wigman and translated by Stephen Frech

This is poetry from Netherlands.

Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar by Menno Wigman translated by Stephen Frech is published by MWC Press. This is a Book originally written in Dutch. This was published in 2012.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780983411635E12.

Zwart als kaviaar / Black as Caviar, by Menno Wigman and translated by Stephen Frech, has a title full of stylish darkness. Wigman’s poetry is often associated with sharp urban melancholy, and this bilingual presentation seems to invite readers into a Dutch lyric mode that is elegant, bruised, and self-aware. I like the extravagance of black caviar as an image: luxury and appetite, darkness and taste, refinement and rot all glinting at once. The poems likely reward readers who enjoy wit with a fatal edge, poems that know beauty can be theatrical without being false. Frech’s translation gives the English reader a way to hear the music of a poet who seems to court gloom while refusing dullness.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.