These poems show the limits of the female image

The new collection of poetry by Charlotte Van den Broeck (1991) is a thoughtfully composed whole. Aarduitfrivingen offers a search for how one looks at the landscape and how one sees the woman (in it).

While male poets such as Mischa Andriessen and Peter Verhelst retell the story of the flood in recent collections with a grand gesture – reflecting contemporary environmental disasters – Van den Broeck focuses with a reverse movement on what comes to life after extreme drought. From descriptions of the desert, from chewing on a pit that is also a stone, from poems about yeast and rot, something slowly but surely blossoms.

The collection also examines what we experience as ‘real’ or even as ‘real’: a situation or its representation. Sometimes the poet leaves open what is reality and what is representation, as in ‘sketch’, which consists only of nouns. This creates a visually crumbly but sound-rich poem. It is a sketch of what is located on a ditch side, but could just as easily be the pointed description of a painting (to be made) or the shopping list of an aquatic plant grower:

pool snail water lily yellow plum
mattenbies dragonfly bulrush reed
brown frog coot young fish
waterweed yellow-rimmed beetles hedgehog’s head
duck grebe sphagnum peat moss
panties larger fish species water sponge
tree glossy star cliff plantain

Looking has an important place in Van den Broeck’s work, both in Van den Broeck’s two earlier collections and in Waagstukken (2019), a collection of visually rich and witty reports about buildings whose architects committed suicide. In it, Van den Broeck describes not only what she sees, but also what watching does to her when she enters David Hockney’s video installation ‘The Four Seasons’. It is as if – in a long, yet single sentence – she is swallowed up by her own perception: ‘I look and the movement pulls me into the image, into the landscape, into the white, and I become the looking, I become the driver, at the same time the slow camera that follows the road into the woods and yet I don’t seem to travel a distance, because the landscape doesn’t change the deeper I sink into it, or so it seems, because suddenly, before I realize it, the the snowy road not only in front of me in the screen, but also behind me, I am on the museum bench and in the middle of that snow, move even deeper into the white landscape – no, I let myself be drawn even deeper into the white by that dragging, forward movement, through the hypnotic looking.’

Also read the review of Van den Broeck’s collection Nachtroer: Paddling through heartbreak

Immersive Descriptions

The reader is not immediately treated to such compelling descriptions in Earth Rubs. By making the hypnotic look less prominent, Van den Broeck takes a new direction. Her interest in visual art has remained intact: the title is derived from visual work by herman de vries, who has been collecting earth samples and rubbing them on paper since 1976. Like herman de vries – who thereby wants to avoid hierarchical systems – she almost consistently rejects capital letters. His rubbings of earth made de vries to ‘depict the visual richness of the earth’. Van den Broeck seems to be pursuing something similar, although she mainly bases her visual richness on ideas about the landscape and metaphors rather than on direct perception:

when the night falls
they say the rocks walk

the desert tosses and drags its sheets
wakes up
a woman without damage, she dresses

for a day trip, she doesn’t carry ghosts
for miles

With a woman without damage, the poet implies that usually all women are damaged – a shocking observation, which, placed almost nonchalantly, hits you hard. This coincides with what Van den Broeck elaborates more specifically in other poems: how the woman, in addition to being a human being, is always an image, which is viewed, adored, affected and distorted – just like the landscape.

The female body and what she represents intertwine in ‘Pretend that a stone is a fruit’. The woman imitates fertility by arranging itself like flesh around a seed:

a woman is sad
in her stomach
scrapes a nectarine pit

she lays down spherical
in imitation of a fruit
to the inside

A woman who, according to the title, pretends that a stone inside her is a fruit, may want to breathe life into something dead. Is she barren? Or is she afraid of that? Or should it not always be projected onto a woman’s body and does the sadness in her stomach – and not the womb – rather refer to hunger? The poem does not give a definitive answer:

keep the gold wasps away
wast

in the wide eye of the afternoon
she is really hungry

but the fruit is hard
and bleeds on the gums

It is beautiful how the blood on the gums evokes something from the inside of the fruit – the body at the beginning of the poem – and the poem itself seems to close like a fruit around a missing core.

Also read the interview with Van den Broeck: ‘My mother punished me for something she could only know from my diary’

Calm abstraction

The poet has expanded her register by varying and playing with moments of calm abstraction and liveliness. In the right dose, the direct observations are overwhelming, with the poem ‘road runner & wile e. coyote’. I am ruthlessly dragged into this. And I’m happy to go along, because Van den Broeck has such a contagious pleasure in absurdities that arise when you look closely at something, and thus not only play a film before the eyes, but make me part of that film. Here we go:

BEEP BEEP
coming – SPEED BAR – Road Runner running
even if he saw the ambush! he will never be able to brake in time!

– UNNNK ??? Road Runner does not crash
running into the depths through the canvas
in the canvas further devises in the painting a way out of the law of the strongest
run from the violent slapstick universe

as far as he can think of the painted landscape and in the performance
of the conceived world awaits him no deep fall, no break, no beast of prey
that devours and tears, in complete bewilderment

Coyote scratches question marks out of his head SKRRR SKRRRR not seen
how a truck comes out of the canvas at high speed – IEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK

KRRRKKKKK-SPLETSCH

but always dead for a while

The energy jumps off the pages here. Road Runner reaches the limits of imagination and breaks through them, just as Charlotte Van den Broeck shows the limits of the female image with this collection. She breaks through it with her poems.

Charlotte Van den Broeck: Earth rubbing. The Workers’ Press, 67 pages. €19.99

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A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 12, 2021

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