Poets

Els Moors (1976) received a warm welcome from Flemish and Dutch critics alike, as the first young Flemish poet to have appeared on the scene for a long time. Her debut Er hangt een hoge lucht boven ons (There is a tall sky above us; 2006) was nominated for the C. Buddingh’-prize and was awarded the Herman de Coninck prize for best poetry debut, where the jury described it as a, ‘debut of one’s dreams’. In There Is A Tall Sky Above Us a rather peculiar ‘I’ describes the ongoing amazement about a rather peculiar world. Important within this world are men; men who are constantly coming and going. In ‘de witte fuckende konijnen’ (the white shagging rabbits), the cycle at the heart of the volume, Moors convincingly shows that the urge is omnipresent and all consuming, showing man’s inner beast. One could say that the volume contains a high quantity of Sex and the City style within its pages, but this comparison would be misplaced. Moors’ humour has a bitter quality and is in no way expressed in one-liners. More often than not, the humour is found in the absurd nature of a situation or in the disruptive nature of an observation. Small, everyday scenes are dissected and then screwed back together again. There is a constant menace at work.