Modest, gentle and universal, these understated poems are a small masterclass in the art of synthesis
Painter, retired civil servant and the eldest child of Lucian, Annie Freud launched her poetry career with funny, often highly sexualised light verse. Now at 72 she has published her fourth collection, Hiddensee– a book that locates her quite differently, as a former student of comparative literature whose imagination is furnished with European high culture and who is, it turns out, a highly accomplished literary translator.
Hiddensee is named after the sandy Baltic island that has been a traditional resort of German writers and artists. In English it’s also of course a richly suggestive compound: poetry, after all, tries to perform acts of divination on the unseen. There is also a suggestion of hide-and-seek, the fort-da game her great-grandfather famously analysed. But the book makes sure you know all about the actual island, and what it represents to the author, because Freud has provided us with an endnote. In fact, this book has a total of 18 endnotes, and superscript numbers are sprinkled across the poems in a way that’s either irritating or refreshingly unexpected, depending on your taste.
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