courtship

Luke Gruwez

In Balts, Luuk Gruwez connects the decisive moments that mark birth and death – albeit not necessarily in a depressing way. Is there a kind of erotic perpetuum mobile underlying our beginning and end, which ensures that what we call art and culture is at the same time a sublimation of biological impulses, thus escaping the realization of being born terminally? Gruwez explores it in verses about love and decay and in variations on old French erotic chansons, culminating in an epilogue by a poet who, back on Ithaka, hangs up his lyre and hides his sex in his slacks.

Luuk Gruwez (1953) is a writer and essayist, but above all (for fifty years now) a poet. His last book was the autobiography The land of the hands (Priv'e domain no. 308), his last collection of poems Bakermat (2018). Balts is his thirteenth, original collection.