Collected Poems (1942-1972)

Albert Bontridder was a Flemish architect and poet. Together with contemporaries such as Jan Walravens and Hugo Claus, he was part of the ground-breaking modernistic magazine ‘Tijd en Mens’. Bontridder was a modernist both in his architecture and his poetry. His meandering, experimental writing, filled with surprising imagery and dumbfounding comparisons, is pervaded by societal and ethical issues. For example, he devoted one collection to the Prague Spring and the fight against authority. The problematic father figure, as a traditional representative of power and authority, appears regularly in his work.

Acutely aware of the destructive power of time, Bontridder does not set an ethical or aesthetic example to his audience. Rather, he holds a broken mirror up to them, creating a reflection in which the poet and reader rebel against their powerlessness. Bontridder was able to convincingly unite a quest for ‘ethics’ with ‘experimentation’. In that sense, his poetry cannot simply be categorised as autonomous, nor as engaged. It is a combination of both: sovereign, yet simultaneously in dialogue with the reader and their living environment.