A World Beyond Myself: Selected Poems

Horses - Their nervous heads in the mist, had I not known who they were, I'd have thought it was no more than the dream of being together in a meadow in the winter, but I knew, I recognized them. They had come out of a past, hesitated, and turned back into it. In recent years poems by the Dutch writer Rutger Kopland have made regular appearances in British magazines and journals, among them "Stand", "Encounter" and "London Magazine". A small pamphlet of his poems was published in 1987 under the title "The Prospect and the River" (Jackson's Arm Press), but this new book is the first substantial selection to appear in English. It charts the development of Kopland's work from the time of his first Dutch book in 1966 - poems that provided ironical, anecdotal impressions of life in a god-fearing rural community - to the latest poems of metaphysical and philosophical explorations and spiritual journeys.