The Poetry Society

‘Awater’, written by Martinus Nijhoff in 1934, is considered the great Dutch modernist poem. Hailed by Brodsky as “the future of poetry”, it is still barely known outside the Netherlands. In it, the poet-narrator trails his mysterious neighbour – Awater – through the city night before abandoning the trail in a train station. Is the poem about the imagination, the unconscious mind, about bereavement, about the existential hollow in the wake of the First World War, about T.S. Eliot, about religion and the old world, about the future? With the help of David Colmer, Professor Wiljan van den Akker, poets Onno Kosters and Astrid Alben, and artist-writer Bette Adriaanse, Jane Draycott looks for answers to these questions. This audio piece is supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.