A01=Esther Jansma
Author_Esther Jansma
Category=DCF
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Product details
- ISBN 9781852247805
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 20 Nov 2008
- Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Esther Jansma is a leading Dutch poet as well as an influential archaeologist. Interweaving a dazzling variety of strands, her poetry explores time and memory, past and present, death, loss, decay and legacy, and yet draws fresh power from these perennial themes because she writes from two opposite but complementary viewpoints. As an archaeologist she refined a technique for establishing the age of wooden artefacts from growth-rings in the wood which could be applied to timber from The Netherlands. Lending a voice to the past, making time visible in all its aspects, is also what she does in her poetry. The philosophical is earthed in the everyday, the mythic intertwines with the mundane, the word with the world. In her early work, the voices of the past are heard from bewildering years: as a child, the death of a father, then as a mother, the loss of a child. Her later poetry is less personal but more compelling as her poetic universe expands, embracing the whole world.
Esther Jansma was born in 1958 in Amsterdam, and now lives in Utrecht. She studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, obtaining her doctorate, for research in dendrochronology. She works as an archaeologist, and is currently senior researcher at Dutch Heritage. She holds a Chair in Dendrochronology at Utrecht University. She has won several awards for her poetry, and has read her work at many international festivals. In 2004 she took part in the Writing on the Wall project, a five-year international programme involving writers from the north of England, Scotland and countries which originally garrisoned Hadrian's Wall. What It Is (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is the first English translation of her work, drawing on all the collections she has published in the Netherlands and including poems inspired by parts of the Wall where Friesian and Schelt Auxiliaries were stationed.
