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December 17, 2024

Henry Gould:

Robert van Vliet’s poems are, paradoxically, both quiet and powerful. With an understated idiom, they express remorse, unease, and struggle—while delivering, at the end, a sense of enigmatic wonder and peace. ¶ It is a balance of contraries. The poems are forthright, simple and clear : yet beneath their unobtrusive surface resides a well of glowing, flashing images; an urge toward existential reckoning. ¶ Simone Weil wrote : “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” The challenging, obdurate, questing voice at the heart of Vessels is unmistakably authentic. It unfolds a basic sense of rightness—which offers, to the reader, a profound encounter with reality. —Henry Gould


Vessels

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