Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This poem is taken from PN Review 186, Volume 35 Number 4, March - April 2009.

Ten Poems (translated by John Gallas and Kurt Ganzl) Emile Verhaeren

Emile Verhaeren, 1855-1916
A Belgian poet, writing in French, Verhaeren took a PhD in law, but soon turned to poetry full-time. It was said that ‘he did not care for bourgeois demands’. Describing the falling away of rural life, these poems have been called both ‘naturalistic’ and ‘examples of symbolism’. He died falling under a train at Rouen station.

bread-cooking

The helps made Sundays-bread,
best milk, best wheat,
bent brows, jutty elbows out of sleeves,
sweat in them, and dropping in the doughtub.

Their hands, fingers, all of them, meant business,
their bodies budged in great bodices,
their thumping two-fists dobbed in dough,
punched bunshapes like breastflesh.

The blackwood cracked in kindled strakes
and off the cookboard’s edge, trays in twos
shoved the palesoft dough into the oven’s belly.

And the flames, through their way-in mouths,
like a huge hot gaggle of scarlet dogs,
...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image