Deep Ebb

William-Jan van Otten

Willem Jan Otten (1951) has been a poet for half a century: six hundred poems, eleven collections. He celebrates this with the composition of a new collection based on fifty precious poems from his own work. In Deep Ebb a journey is made, from birth to birth. Halfway through an end is reached, or is it a hole, or a cat flap, a portal. Otten ignores the order in which the poems originated. In Deep Ebb, time passes as in a dream, while each poem individually is wide awake, sensory, visual, appealing. A 'thinking landscape' is created, island dunes, unskated Ankeveense Plassen, Frisian lakes, Irish coasts, a Sloterpark. People are known, loved ones are lost; love is declared, God missed. The poet becomes husband of, father, grows old. He swims room by room into the eel trap of poetry. Deep ebb appears simultaneously, in a twin edition, with Will you teach me poetry?, an essay 'in search of the poem that says what I want to say'.