Selected Poems

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This is the first-ever collection of Rodenbach's poetry to be published in English translation. In it, Rodenbach's vision of Bruges, so brilliantly portrayed in his famous symbolist novel, Bruges la Morte, is drawn with even more potency. Using the symbolist devices of suggestion and mood, Rodenbach, in these poems, sifts the elements that make up the decaying Bruges. He sees it as a medieval corpse laid out for him to 'rescue' through his interpretation of its atmosphere of melancholy, its seductive romantic decline and its loneliness. With rare beauty and delicacy, Rodenbach's poetry spins its web of tonal impressionism and seems always to exist on the border of silence.