next

Introduction Hanny Michaelis was born in 1922 in Amsterdam, and her small but distinctive oeuvre has been awarded numerous literary prizes.                Michaelis has established a reputation as a poet of contained lyricism, and her work is characteristically tempered by an almost wry awareness of limitation.   While her poems are  often marked by an epigrammatic conciseness and an element of analytical reflection, Michaelis nevertheless embraces the individual, felt experience, in which the overriding logic is that of the imagination.           Since the recent publication of her memoirs, there has been renewed interest in her life.  As the daughter of Jewish parents who died in Sobibor, Michaelis was confronted with loss and devastation at an early age, and these themes are inherent in much of her poetry.  Her difficult marriage to the well-known Dutch novelist Gerard Reve, and the tragic death of her second partner, undoubtedly account for the mournful note of much of her love poetry.  And yet there is also a toughness, an ability to re-inhabit an experience without sentimentality, that give her poems their particular force.

next