ABSTRACT
Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers is one of the most exciting anthologies that I have ever read. It is full of compelling, funny, unsettling, challenging, and formally innovative poems that should deeply impress English readers, though for the Dutch this provocative writing indeed springs from over a half-century ago. De Vijftigersbeweging—”the Fiftiers’ Movement”—was made up of Dutchmen and Flemish-writing Belgians who were born just after the First World War or in the 1920s and who burst onto the literary scene after the Second World War, that is during “the grand spree of / Liberation” when, in the words of the ever-frank Remco Campert (b. 1929), “water turned into whisky” and “everybody boozed and fucked, / all Europe was one big mattress / and the sky the ceiling / of a third-rate hotel.”
