City of Sandcastles, Selected Poems
City of Sandcastles, Selected Poems, by Hagar Peeters, translated by Judith Wilkinson. Shoestring Press, 2018. 99 pages. £12 (paperback).
Judith Wilkinson has assembled and translated a magnificent introduction to the work of the Dutch poet, Hagar Peeters. Born in 1972, Peeters has published at least five volumes of poems, a novel, and other works, but this small anthology is the first of her work to appear in English. The poems are bold, imaginative, and take incisive looks at love, art, family, memory, life, and identity. The individual volume titles are as good as the collection’s title: Enough About Love for Today (1999), A Suitcase Full of Sea Air (2003), Runner of Light (2008), Fruition ((2011), and Poems for Wich (2012). Wilkinson picked poems from each of the five volumes and presents them in sections in book publication order.
The poems from Enough About Love for Today were written in her mid-twenties and she arrives in print pretty fully formed. Topics will develop in complexity as the volume progresses but you can’t say these first poems are those of a young poet finding her way; they compel attention from the first line of the first poem:
“Shall I Walk with You Some of the Way?”
Why not. You may walk with me as far as the traffic lights
or as far as the very next underpass.
As far as the third street on the right,
as far as the entrance to the park.
As far as the hospital, as far as beyond
the hospital, right up to my front door.
You may walk with me as far as inside my room,
as far as a glass of something or other,
as far as when I’ve brushed my teeth
or when the first morning light
falls across the chair with the clothes.
The poem continues to unfold in a string of near Dr. Seussian permissions, concluding with “you may walk with me.” It’s charming, slyly witty, and as magically precise as a potion needs to be.
All the poems in Enough About Love for Today are, of course, about love, desire, relationships, heartbreak. Poems capture the mystery of long-term relationships (“let your wrinkles be the paths / on which I set out, always together, / and walk to the end of my own life.”), rejection (a litany of unconvincing rationales for being stood up), lost love (“You’re waiting. For me. But / you’ve forgotten my name.”) Peeters uses images of acrobats, language, and the sea.
In summer I’d stay behind
in the city, where the sand
was nothing but streets….
I’d scoop tinned food into my bucket
with the shell of my hand.
I spent my days
finding lots of pebbles.
I built, built fair and square
my castles
in the air.
This second half of an untitled poem represents a bait and switch from its start. The poem, beginning with a motto from Rafael Alberti (El mar, la mar…) and then with this line, “The sea, the sea, the seaaaaaa / that’s still there too,” is impressive because we learn in summer she stayed behind. The little child voice of the initial shout rings differently as we read on and the details of the make-believe play of beachgoing in the city streets and the poem's end (“build fair and square”) are immersive and adeptly done. (And, well translated, getting the subtleties of the shift and tone cannot be easy.)
This poem about childhood is an exception to the poems about romantic love but it is in part where the work goes in the second section, A Suitcase Full of Sea Air, which is more centered on family and the loneliness of growing up in a single-parent home. To give you the full flavor of one of Peeters's poems, here is the section’s first poem:
Last Night I Ran Into My Parents
Last night I ran into my parents,
two pale shadows inclining towards
each other in the glow of a street light.
Judging by their happiness I hadn’t yet
been born. They were young and very much in love.
A great sadness weighed me down,
knowing how the story would unfold.
He whispered something and she laughed out loud.
He roared with laughter as he still often does.
Briefly we exchanged civilities
and then we went our separate ways.
‘We’ll meet again,’ I called after them,
‘you’ll see, our paths will cross.’ They didn’t speak.
Arm in arm they turned the corner of the street.
In the two poems that follow she describes being an only child. For example, in “A Soft Stone,” Peeters writes:
I am the stumbling stone my parents decided
to stumble over only once: so I am alone.
And in “The Same Sea,” she writes:
I alone know both my parents:
preferring not to err repeatedly,
they bathed just once in the same sea.
These are personal poems but they claim an observational distance that allows her to see in multiple persons: first, third, and even second, not to mention past and present. In the poem “The Great Trek” she returns to the subject recounted in “The sea, the sea, the seeaaaaaa”:
I saw the neighbors opposite one morning
packing their cases with sea air.
My caravan of playmates became the tail
of their kite, waving from the window of their car,
snagging briefly on a balcony
before they turned the corner.
They set out for the City of Sandcastles,
a stone’s throw away from Amsterdam…
This is a well-observed image, playmates as a kite tail trailing after their parents, snagging on a balcony as they disappear around the corner, the balcony perhaps becoming the snagged child observing from the balcony. To call Peeters perceptive when it comes to longing, memory, the enduring effects of disappointment on us would be an understatement. Perceptive and succinct.
Here is one more poem from this section, in its entirety, called “In Their Shadow”:
It is the fate of generations
to be separated, time and again,
and to prize open different worlds
all on this one and only earth.
The future has no room for the elderly,
the distant past accommodates no minors
and the rest no dead people.
They live in one anothers’ shadow.
After the day has risen
they go on sleeping
in chambers that cut across our walls
while we talk slap through them.
Like Wislawa Szymborska, Peeters gives you early admittance to her poems, with enticing first lines and simple language artfully arranged. The second stanza complicates things by creating strata: future, distant past, and “the rest”—now?—so you no longer know where you are or where this is going. Particularly when the fourth line unites the strata, alive, in each other’s shadow. Like Szymborska she is playful and serious at the same time. And, of course, this isn’t just a continuum of populations (the elderly, minors, dead people) in the same way as it is of time-places (future, past), but also a reverse continuum of each of our lives. The day rises, we linger asleep, talking slap across our old, young, and present selves. (If an American edition comes, which I sincerely hope is the case, I assume “talk slap” will become “talk smack.”)
In the third section Peeters explores her namesake and ideas of exile, separation, independence, gender, and self-assertion. Hagar was an Egyptian slave of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. When Sarah doesn’t succeed in having a son, which Abraham needs for his ambitions, Sarah “gives” Hagar to her husband as a wife. (The Bible is silent on how or if this was negotiated between Sarah and Hagar.) In the event, Hagar has Ishmael and Sarah begins to abuse Hagar for putting on airs. Abraham allows the abuse and Hagar runs away, but is coaxed back by an angel of God. When Isaac is born to Sarah, Sarah again drives Hagar away, with Ishmael. The angel of God appears again and promises Hagar that from her descendants God will make a great nation. It is the same promise he made to Abraham. Almost. In this ambitious sequence of poems Peeters uses the story of Hagar—again with a defiance of an individual’s limits of time—to examine an ancient story while finding contemporary meaning that was either between the lines or absent. This is her introduction of Hagar:
I was considered too impudent
an eternity ago
banished to the desert
and here
—do you see that Arabian steed
that horse of iron wire
that bellowing Guernica?
That’s me.
The “eternity ago,” the “and here,” “that Arabian steed,” the “bellowing Guernica,” and, of course, the ironically understated and defiant “That’s me” all suggest not so much timelessness but a singular uninterrupted time line of recurring character and circumstance. It takes you beyond Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac to an endless story of power, abuse, exile, resistance, and determination.
In this section Peeters deeply and expansively explores the specific story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah. In poems like “Exile,” “In the Name,” “Reassuring,” “Broken,” and “The Door Ajar,” the stories and voices are biblical, describing, among other things, a litany of -ites that are Hagar’s descendants, concluding, “He kept his word. / Father Abraham’s progeny was vast. // Ites / isms / egos. // That’s more or less how the story went.” The coy dismissal belies the work the poems actually do, putting flesh and blood, humanity and the complexity of relationships, power and gender, history, religion, and the personal under the microscope. The irony isn’t a summary but a release, like a sigh or head shake.
Other poems in the section have subjects identified only as “he” or “she” or “the exile” or “you,” stated or implied, as in the poem, “The Saying Goes.”
Just as a Roman army, after a defeat,
accepted the journey back
so, after every loss, a journey back is possible.
Accept it.
Don’t accept the loss
but the journey back that follows it
all the way into your own entrenchment,
the body’s armour
all the way to where you were
before the loss followed
and choose something else.
A road to Rome.
Before this poem are two poems with images of counting on one’s fingers. Like “The Saying Goes,” the second poem, “Advice—No Strings Attached” contains the illusion of self-help where something more fundamental seems intended instead. “Sometimes a pause is enough. / Before you answer, during a conversation, / count to ten on your fingers.” It’s advice, as is its conclusion:
Be gracious when you arrive
and when you’re about to go home.
Leave a token of your appreciation.
Yet there is something, not irony, not cynicism, but something human that goes beyond the formulaic pitch you might encounter in a business workshop. The final twist is sincerity.
In the poem “An Example,” which begins “Like the man who knows / he’s losing,” Peeters summarizes his failures—one assumes the list is not complete—and then ends:
He looks at his hands.
Somewhere they have missed their hold.
He tries to remember when that was
folds them in his lap
and so assumes the opposite posture
to that of a person reaching out
or perhaps he is counting his fingers
without anyone noticing.
So, it is not just the use of humor and the mundane, mashed up with the historical, that reminds me of Szymborska, but Peeters's use of ambiguity girded with humanity and empathy.
The last poem in the section is called “Hagar’s Ambitions” and this time “Hagar” might be Ms. Peeters and the biblical Hagar co-signing and posting a manifesto that both declares and mocks. “Let me be one of the decadents and drink with the men,” it begins, invoking Baudelaire, Whitman, “and all the great self-believing conquerors” as part of a gallop of nine stanzas over three pages that disappears over the horizon with:
I will break off the heels of my stilettos.
I refuse to go on stumbling across the pavestones
unless they are the tiles that lead to my own palaces,
and whatever limits my freedom of movement,
renders me invisible or shuts me out,
I shall cast off, or cast before the feet
of him who provoked me, before I trample it underfoot.
And if you ask me to strip off as many clothes as possible
I shall order you to lead the way
and leave it at that.
The final two sections are short and different. The poems in Fruition, published in her late 30s are a mix of poems written then and when the poet was in her late teens and early 20s. There is no sussing out which is which. When I said earlier that Peeters arrived in print fully-formed, I meant it and the forming pre-dates even her first book. There are poems about a grandmother, tributes to two Dutch poets, matriarchs, God’s flossers, love, a museum of maps, and more. One of the grandmother poems might be another “Hagar.” The poem is called “My Grandmother Was a Front Soldier,” and includes the section’s one-word title (“the women came to fruition once a year”). In it, the village women annually have children…that is the front, survival, they soldier on without reward. It is a feudal life where “it wasn’t the emperor who was checkmated / but the mother who had no heaven / to rely on, nor a life / to look back on.” It’s breathtaking.
The last section is a work of commission, a set of elegies/commemorations of a Dutch set designer and artist, Harry Wich. The poems, only six, are beautiful. One poem, “The Light of the Sea,” conjures up the beauty of earlier poems.
Look: the water doesn’t stand there but radiates
outwards and the clouds rise up
from the blue of the water
and the clouds are the sea
only descended into water
and the light doesn’t aim at anything,
it’s simply there.
Peeters continues her description but acknowledges that is just how she pictures it “but the sea eludes / my explanation.” Perhaps. If it is only her explanation, we recognize it and hold onto it too. In her homages to Wich she seems to be making art’s case for recognition and its importance—not recognition of the artist but the artist’s duty to recognize, to witness, to share, whether it is the light of the sea or the endurance of Hagar. I hope Wilkinson’s work as translator and herald leads to an American edition of City of Sandcastles and the recognition of Peeters as a major world poet whose work regularly finds a global audience.
—Reviewer Rick Larios is a reader and occasional writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cara. He reads because it saved his life as a child growing up on the West Side of Manhattan and he'd be a fool to stop now.