Night Atlas
Peter Verhelst is one of Flanders’ most acclaimed, most talked-about and, indeed, most widely embraced poets. In 'Night Atlas', he explores the distance between people and the world around them: between lovers, between body and landscape, between life and death. The collection consists of three parts, with titles taken from quotations by Bob Dylan, Agnès Varda and Dylan Thomas. Together, they bring major human themes to the fore: love and silence, connection and loss, and our resistance to death. Verhelst does not name these experiences directly, but evokes them through sensory imagery, occasionally punctuated by a simple exhortation, like in the very first poem: ‘Say yes.’
Verhelst draws the reader in; he captivates and enthrals.DW B
'Night Atlas' reaches for what is difficult to grasp or put into words. Verhelst briefly lifts the reader out of reality and makes the intangible more tangible. This is a new high point in Verhelst’s impressive, multi-award-winning and genre-defying body of work.
It won’t save the world, but it is a remarkable experience: the way Peter Verhelst uses his language to lift us out of reality, so that we no longer know ‘whether we are awake or dreaming we are falling’.Humanistisch Verbond
