Rob van Essen ventures into poetry in a rather unbalanced bundle ★★☆☆☆

Right at the start of his recalcitrant debut bundle Only the warm days were real Rob van Essen lays his cards on the table. Noticing that everything has already been written, he pulverizes the writers to dust and washes them away with rain. After that, even in the sewers it remains silent. It was as if the writers had nothing left to say and no one really interested in them anymore: ‘careless feet’ scattered the dust. And what about the poets? What does the poet Van Essen, who as a writer with a dozen novels and collections of short stories, actually have to say?

The poems in Only the warm days were real are often about erasing what is there and human attempts to replace it with something new: wishful thoughts and projections, for example. ‘The world swept itself empty’, we read fairly early in the collection, ‘meaning flowed in all directions / but mostly away from us’. Not much later he writes about the memory of the anti-nuclear weapons demonstration on the Museumplein in 1981. Overtaken by time, the I – oh, paradox – can no longer remember its uninhibited younger version. And about childhood memories, Van Essen writes that we only remember the warm days – the poet must have had a good childhood in the east of the country. It is a beautiful picture that our memory has to reach the right temperature in order to store memories. But otherwise the warm days idea does not show much depth. Just present it to someone whose parental blows still hail.

The simplicity of a pop song

Unfortunately, that applies to more of the poems in Only the hot days were real. It is a collection in which we often find poems (and thoughts) that sometimes lean towards the simplicity of a pop song and that at times rub against clichés. In a poem about David Bowie we read: ‘You shouldn’t judge an artist/on his best work but on his work//you shouldn’t pay at all/not without a tip’. It’s all too under-refined, too explicit to be really funny. Humor and poetry are also not an easy marriage. In any case, Van Essen lacks in this collection the soft irony that makes the corners of the mouth curl up.

As a reader, you get the impression that in this poetry Van Essen takes a more naive attitude than he is, as if he sometimes wants to take the perspective of a child or adolescent. The poem ‘plus forty’, which is about the forty years difference in age between the ego and the father, is a good example of this. The feigned wonder at the fact that the father always remains forty years older, even after death, is too uninteresting to really captivate and only works in the last stanza, in which a shift in perspective (from the I to the grandparents) takes place: ‘To my grandparents’ astonishment, there lay in the cradle a man older/ than their grandchild would ever be’.

unbalanced

All in all Only the warm days were real a rather unbalanced bundle. There are monstrosities of verse in and a few beautiful poems. It’s a bit like Van Essen writes about the worst albums of one of his musical heroes: ‘even on the worst albums by david bowie/ there is at least one song for which you/ would give your left arm or in any case/ your left pinky’ . I would not advise anyone to give up a limb, left or right and however small, for this poetry. That might be a different story for a new novel by Van Essen. But yes, he has just pushed the writers aside, through the gully, into the dung of the sewer.