Raptors

Description

With the economy of a proverb and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to 'my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

Toon Tellegen, born in 1941, is one of Holland's best known writers, the recipient of many awards. He is foremost a poet but is also a successful children's book writer and novelist. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife, and worked as a general medical practitioner until his recent retirement.

'His [Tellegen's] complex, often surreal and always highly affecting poems exhibit an understanding of the power of the story in which the dream-like psychology, the marvellously nuanced telling of a family's malaise set him apart as an entirely distinctive voice in European poetry.' - 2011 Popescu Prize judges Sasha Dugdale and Jane Draycott.