In an Unguarded Moment

Hanny Michaelis (1922-2007) is an award-winning Dutch poet, known for her concise, almost epigrammatic poems. Hers is a poetry of restraint, but it is an impassioned restraint. As the daughter of Jewish parents who died in Sobibor, she was faced with loss at an early age. She spent the latter part of the war in hiding, being moved from one place to another whenever there was a risk of betrayal, and all the while she went on writing poetry and kept a diary. In sober, pared-down language she unflinchingly confronts her harrowing experiences, vividly recording her emotions, but without any note of self-pity. Her love poems, some of which arose from her difficult marriage to the well-known Dutch novelist Gerard Reve, are at once tender and critical, mournful and ironic.