Hanny Michaelis was born in 1922 in Amsterdam, and her small but distinctive oeuvre has been awarded numerous literary prizes. Michaelis established a reputation as a poet of contained lyricism, and her work is characteristically tempered by an almost wry awareness of limitation. While her poems are often marked by an epigrammatic conciseness and an element of detached and analytical reflection, Michaelis nevertheless embraces the individual, felt experience, in which the overriding logic is that of the imagination.
Over the years
a great deal has to be thrown out.
The notion, for instance,
...
Love rolled away
to the other end
of the world. Faith
smothered in the mud
...
Sometimes like gems
and sometimes like pieces of scrap.
The light falls as it chooses.
But whether it's morning
...
Sleepless in the cavern
of the night.
All roads to you
rolled up into a black
...
Years later
one clear afternoon
full of sober sounds
and the hustle and bustle in a house
...