Night Boat and other poems - Maria Barnas

Maria Barnas is a poet who has also written prose and she is a successful artist as well. Not surprisingly, her language is imbued with the mystery of how we perceive material reality. Art offers us a range of ways of looking at life.

This can generate a sense of ambivalence and bewilderment in the mind of the reader and seemingly that of the poet too; the result however can be an expansion of one's horizons. Barnas attempts to find language for what she sees. Maybe this is why she is always in search of the narrative behind the poem or the poem beneath what she observes.

This sets her work in the most important trend in contemporary Dutch poetry and poetry criticism, which is mainly concerned with the subject-matter and where the anecdote has pride of place. (Rozalie Hirs) nn