“Go home, Poetry, and take me with you,” H.H. ter Balkt writes in his most recent collection Vuur (Fire). He seems to be convinced that poetry is not where it ought to be. In his poems he urges all sorts of vehicles to make a good speed, and lets fly at dumb-clucks and other highwaymen who send poetry racing off in the wrong direction. Even if those people lived centuries ago, Ter Balkt still calls them to order. “I’ve always had song feedback around/ about where your abode is: behind the mountains.”

Henk van der Waal writes poetry with a melodious, eroticising use of words. In his poems, those words often have a forward-propelling effect. What is striking is that he does not shy away from intelligence or erudition. Van der Waal is classical and modern in one.

He made his debut in 1995 with the collection De windsels van de sfinx (The Sphinx’s Swathing Bands). “The lines themselves consist of long sentences that could be conceived as swathing bands. These swathing bands of words, when unravelled, revealed an enigmatic silence,” essayist Maarten Doorman wrote.

Peter van Lier is a strange poet. His work consists of meticulous observations of human actions. In doing so, he seems to strive for neutrality and objectivity – a venture that never quite succeeds. And this is exactly what makes his subdued precision so fascinating. Precarious, small incidents are held there in his words. Measured observations. Stems of grass. Prams. Insects. The quest for the unsulliedness of things, humans, has something helpless, something poignant about it. It appears to be naive – but the reader knows better.