Earthskin

Earthskin is a selection of the finest poems by the Frisian poet Elmar Kuiper. Rendered in English with exceptional finesse by the award-winning David Colmer, this collection is a glorious illustration of the heights that creative translation can achieve.

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“Even a cursory consideration of Elmar Kuiper’s work reveals the poet’s love of sound and rhythm. He combines this with powerful images that aren’t immediately decipherable, but still speak for themselves and invite you into the poet’s mental world. Often he presents animals as autonomous characters or metaphors. His poems “breathe” life. He asks a great many questions, establishing dialogues. Using a register that is often harsh and hard, Kuiper writes of death, sorrow, longing and love.”
Geart Tigchelaar

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Earthskin breathes a spade cuts
who throws me on the shovel?
Earthskin steams a shoveller sweats
is the earth crying?

Listen one busy morning
as a centipede,
cut off from lightness

having lost
cut by cut
one by one
all its legs

wriggling a second longer.

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Elmar Kuiper (b. 1969) is a visual artist, performer and filmmaker who writes short stories, poetry and drama. He is the author of six Frisian-language collections of poems. He published a bilingual collection, Roep de Rottweiler op! (Call the Rottweiler!), in 2006 and a book of short stories, In frjemde fûgel (A Strange Bird), in 2020. His third Dutch collection, Blauwe Hanen (Blue Roosters), is forthcoming from Atlas Contact. His poetry has been nominated for several awards, and Ut namme fan mysels (On Behalf of Myself) was chosen by the Frankfurt Book Fair as one of ‘ten books from Friesland’. A selection of his work has been translated and published in German. Kuiper has won the Rely Jorritsma Prize nine times and performed in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, India, Portugal, Scotland and Spain. His work has been translated into Danish, German, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Scottish and Icelandic, among other languages.

David Colmer is an Australian writer, translator and editor who lives in Amsterdam. He translates novels, poetry and children’s literature from Dutch and occasionally Frisian and has won several major prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker), as well as Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. In 2021 he was awarded the James Brockway Prize for his translations of Dutch poetry. His most recent published translations include A Guardian Angel Recalls by Willem Frederik Hermans and the poetry of Cees Nooteboom, Nachoem M. Wijnberg and Radna Fabias.