Greetings: Selected Poems

The first English-language collection of poems by this major Flemish writer, Greetings contains work from more than six decades of Hugo Claus's career. Uncompromising and irreverent, Claus writes about postwar politics and society, about race and class, love and sex, art and literature. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in the avant-garde of the last half-century-and to anyone interested in poetry that continues to be provocative, pertinent, and compelling.

Year of atrocities, year of cathode-ray tube and stock market report,
Year of milk and honey if you're asleep,
Year that sticks in your stomach if you're awake,
Sweet year, good year for sleepwalkers . . .

Year that freezes the smile.
It was in that year I went to live in a village
with books, a wife and a child
who grows
while I talk about the tigers in the East.

- F R O M " 1 9 6 5 "