Book description
With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a
novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics
of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a
father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic.
Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of
European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of
the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of
interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to my
father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without
narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held
within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator
Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English
poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the
original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.
"His complex, often surreal and always highly affecting poems
exhibit an understanding of the power of the story in which the
dream-like psychology, the marvellously nuanced telling of a family's
malaise set him apart as an entirely distinctive voice in European
poetry." Sasha Dugdale and Jane Draycott, 2011 Popescu Prize
judges. "Toon Tellegen was born in 1941 on one of the islands in
the south-west of the Netherlands. He is one of the best-known Dutch
writers, with a long list of awards to his name. In 2007 he received two
major prizes for his entire oeuvre. He considers himself in the first
place a poet and has published more than twenty collections of poetry to
date, but he is also a novelist and a prolific and popular children's
author. Toon Tellegen lives in Amsterdam with his wife, and worked as a
GP until his recent retirement. He gives frequent readings of his work,
often with musical accompaniment; in 2009 he read the whole of
Raafvogels ('Raptors') at the Perdu theatre in Amsterdam. Judith
Wilkinson is a British poet and prize-winning translator living in the
Netherlands. Her first two collections of translations, the Belgian poet
Miriam Van hee's Instead of Silence (a PBS Recommendation), and Toon
Tellegen's About Love and About Nothing Else, were published by
Shoestring Press. A collection of her own poems, Tightrope Dancer, was
published by Shoestring Press in 2010. Some of these poems have been
performed by the dance theatre company The Kosh. Her website can be
visited at www. judithwilkinson. net.
