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This selection introduces a major Dutch poet who is also a distinguished business studies professor. "You have to unlearn how to read poetry before you can read the poetry of Nachoem M. Wijnberg," wrote his editor Bertram Mourits. His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity: he claims they "at least promise to be about the important things in everyone's life." I might just as well stop writing poetry; no one else can tell me what the words mean. . . . Here are some tired words I mean and words that have grown old in poems I try to understand.

Nachoem M. Wijnberg, born in Amsterdam in 1961, has published fourteen volumes of poetry. A Law and Economics graduate, he became in 2005 the first Professor of Cultural Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of Amsterdam Business School. His poetry has won many prizes, including the Jan Campert Prize, the Ida Gerhardt Prize and the most prestigious Dutch prize for poetry, the VSB Poetry Prize. David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator based in Holland. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion and is a two-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. His translations include Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater and selections from Ramsey Nasr, Cees Nooteboom and Hugo Claus.