What It Is: Selected Poems

Jansma is a leading Dutch poet as well as an influential archaeologist. Weaving a dazzling variety of thematic strands, her poetry explores time, memory, past, present, death, loss, decay and legacy, yet draws fresh power from these perennial themes because she writes from two opposite but complementary viewpoints. In her early work, the voices of the past are heard from bewildering years: as a child, the disappearance of a father, then as a mother, the loss of a child.