The East Acre Poems

Hugo Claus was a self-taught man: a voluminous writer, but also a voluminous reader. The numerous foreign models and influences which he could bend to his own hand without difficulty, make his poetic palette enormously diverse. His oeuvre includes the most differing poetic forms, styles, themes and poetics in autobiographical verses, complex intertextual rewritings, montage texts, satirical occasional poetry and socially committed poems.

One of the many highpoints in his oeuvre are ‘The East Acre Poems’, which have lost little of their fascinating enigmatic character. Experimental writing in this volume turned into classical ways. Using old myths of fertility described by Frazer, biblical and Christian references and literary quotations, Claus evokes a mythical and fatal family constellation in which the mother, the father, the son and the beloved play roles that are alternately driven by desire and love, but also by fear and hatred. The cycle ‘A woman’ these days still stands as one of the most impressive descriptions of physical love which depicts the lovers in their aggressiveness.