Released 29th February, 2024 // 978-1-915760-90-6 // 370 pages // RRP £16.99
F. van Dixhoorn’s Collected Works is made up of sequences and series in which short colloquial phrases make surprising, sometimes puzzling, connections inside strict 16-line grids. Different counting mechanisms in each series create a cadence that orders a multitude of disparate data and places them in a new field of tension: observations, memories, reflections, impressions, and current events. The poems depict in an extraordinary way what can go on the poet’s mind on any given day: consciously, semi-consciously and unconsciously. Poetry, in short, as an art form. Poetry, in short, which creates and obeys only its own laws.
PRAISE for Collected Works:
F. van Dixhoorn's poetry is fascinating. So much of its action and phrasing speaks of resistance to false dramatisation, yet he delivers up in almost every poem's quietly visionary narrative a kind of small and ground-level firework display. It's that excitement which Astrid Alben so brilliantly relays in these new translations, opening up with skilled attentiveness the shapes and choreography of van Dixhoorn's unique imaginative landscapes - landscapes which, as Alben astutely recognises, seem absolutely simultaneous with the performance of his poems on the page.
— Jane Draycott, The Kingdom
ABOUT Astrid Alben & F. van Dixhoorn:
Frans (François Henricus Anthonia) van Dixhoorn was born in 1948 in Hansweert, Zeeland, in the south of the Netherlands. Shortly after the North Sea flood of 1953, the family moved to Vlissingen. In 1972, he became a teacher at the primary school in Nieuw- en St. Joosland, just outside Middelburg. He remained at this school for seventeen years, and taught oral and written language expression at various schools in the area. In 1986, he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived for ten years before returning to Middelburg. He became a full-time artist from the mid-1980s: at first mainly with visual work (although this did not lead to exhibitions) and from the early 1990s as a poet. Van Dixhoorn has published seven collections, all with De Bezige Bij. He is the recipient of the C. Buddingh Prize for best first collection (1994), the Woordlijst Prize (2007) and he is a 2012 Ida Gerhard Prize and VSB-Prize nominee. In 2009, the translation of the first three collections was published in French by Le bleu du ciel; and his work has been translated into German, where it has been set to music and toured nationally.
Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. Her translation of Anne Vegter’s Island glacier mountain won an English PEN Translates Award in 2022. She is the international commissioning editor at Prototype Publishing.
