Night Boat and other poems

"Maria Barnas is a poet who has also written prose and she is a successful artist as well. Not surprisingly, her language is imbued with the mystery of how we perceive material reality. Art offers us a range of ways of looking at life. This can generate a sense of ambivalence and bewilderment in the mind of the reader and seemingly that of the poet too; the result however can be an expansion of one's horizons. Barnas attempts to find language for what she sees. Maybe this is why she is always in search of the narrative behind the poem or the poem beneath what she observes. This sets her work in the most important trend in contemporary Dutch poetry and poetry criticism, which is mainly concerned with the subject-matter and where the anecdote has pride of place." (Rozalie Hirs)

Maria Barnas (1973) is a poet, writer, critic, and visual artist. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She won the C. Buddingh' Prize for her first collection of poetry, Twee zonnen (Two Suns, 2003) and in 2009 she received the J.C. Bloem Prize for Er staat een stad op (A City Rises, 2007). In 2014 her collection Ja, ja, de oerknal (Yeah-yeah the Big Bang), was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize. She published a novel in 2017 Altid Augustus (Always Augustus) and in 2018 her poetry collection Nachtboot (Night Boat) appeared, for which she was shortlisted for the Netherlands' most prestigious poetry award, De Grote Poezieprijs. In 2022 she published Diamant zonder r (Diamond without an 'r'), a sequence of poems about the question of which language one belongs to and about her Polish grandmother. Her work has been described as 'contemplative, musical poetry, desperate and humorous, powerful and brittle, with a transparency that gets more complex on re-reading'.

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