The purest poetic intelligence of his generation, the author of poems of lapidary beauty.

J.M. Coetzee
Hans Faverey

Hans Faverey

Hans Faverey (1933–1990) was born in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, but grew up in Amsterdam. He was a clinical psychologist at the University of Leiden. He published eight collections of poetry and received various literary awards, including the 1990 Constantijn Huygens Prize for his work as a whole.

cover image of the book Against The Forgetting

Against The Forgetting

by Hans Faverey

Translated by Francis R. Jones

With a contribution by Eliot Weinberger

Against the Forgetting presents the work of the Netherlands’ most eminent twentieth-century poet, Hans Faverey. This collection brings together poems from his eight published volumes spanning the years 1968 to 1990 as well as a selection of poems from a posthumous collection, Spring Foxes, first published in Holland in 2000. Filled with a precision and arresting musicality comparable to the hermetic poems of Celan and Bronk, and as mysterious as the writings of Heraclitus and the German mystic Meister Eckhart, Faverey’s poems, like Lichtenberg’s lightning frozen in time, lash out, splintering systems and syntax––enlightening.

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The purest poetic intelligence of his generation, the author of poems of lapidary beauty.

J.M. Coetzee

Hans Faverey made his reputation only gradually … He is a poet of losses and silences, of meditations on change and how change either undermines or strengthen our sense of reality.

Edwin Morgan
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