Be forewarned: Stephen Frech’s translation brings into English Menno Wigman’s deft erosions of the daily, exposing the perilous dark into which all of us are prone to fall, but few of us face with such disturbing certainty. And no one gazes with drier eyes into his own error and its often excruciating aftermath than does Wigman. In these poems we careen precisely—never precariously, given Wigman’s exacting craft—“deeper, deeper than a man had ever looked / down the iron barrel of his life.” But a vitality often erupts which offers something we can trust to be more edifying than solace, Wigman’s clarity of witness: “Afternoon. Ditches. Canals. Symmetry.”

~Rusty Morrison

Menno Wigman’s Black as Caviar presents, as the title suggests, a profoundly—and hauntingly—pessimistic world in which a book of poetry mostly “torment[s] / sixty-four readers” and “fell[s] two trees” and the speaker’s life is “the aftermath of a wet joke.” Measured, often darkly funny, and rendered beautifully into English by Stephen Frech, these poems push back against “the horde that bears a horde”; they see Europe as “a mass grave / that radiates with hope”—though that hope is too often limited to the buying of “rouge, toys, and watches.” This is an important book of poems aimed at the very heart of 21^st century Western decadence.

~Wayne Miller

In this fast moving world, Menno Wigman is the last remaining romantic voice in Dutch poetry. If you ask Dutch poets from this generation who will be read in a hundred years, nine out of ten will say Menno Wigman. Stephen Frech has done Menno Wigman’s poems and the readers of poetry in English a great service with these translations.

~Lucas Hirsch