Born in 1968 in The Hague, Erik Lindner is one of the Netherland's most acclaimed poets. Admired for a style that fuses simplicity with strangeness, Lindner builds his poems through a montage of descriptive images that, by fending off closure, generate extraordinary visionary power. Gathering together new work with a selection from his previous six collections, Words are the Worst offers a range of pleasures that have made him celebrated in his home country: an austere eloquence; a hard, unsparing precision; a restless and idiosyncratic eye. Best of all is how his intensely filmic observations transform haunted landscapes of windmills, birds, dogs and houseboats on canals into, as one critic put it, "Lindner-like" moments. Brilliantly translated by Francis R. Jones, with an introduction by Canadian poet David O'Meara, Words are the Worst introduces a leading Dutch voice to English readers.

Erik Lindner is a Dutch poet, writer, and literary critic. His first book of poetry, Tramontane, appeared in 1996. Five more collections have followed, including two novels. His work has been translated into French, German and Italian. Words are the Worst: Selected Poems is his first volume of poetry in English.

Erik Lindner's profile page

Francis R. Jones translates poetry from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Hungarian, Russian and Dutch. His translations have received many important UK and international awards, and is the only translator to have won the UK's biennial European Poetry Translation Prize twice. Professor of Translation Studies at Newcastle University, Jones lives in rural Northumberland.

Francis Jones' profile page

David O'Meara was born in Pembroke, Ontario. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and a play, Disaster. His most recent book is Noble Gas, Penny Black. His work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The New Canon, and The Echoing Years, a co-Irish/Canadian anthology. He has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Prize, a National Magazine Award, four Rideau Awards (theatre), and was twice winner of the Archibald Lampman Award. He is director of the renowned Plan 99 Reading Series, a founding director of VerseFest, Canada's International Poetry Festival, and will be poetry instructor at the Banff Centre in September 2012. He continues to tend bar at the Manx Pub in Ottawa.

David O'Meara's profile page

"Lindner's poetry cuts into the quotidian mise en scène to lay
bare illuminating juxtapositions across time and space. What is left
on the screen of the page opens up another way of seeing, rife with
amazement and curiosity." - Montreal Review of Books