About the Book: Monks Eye
Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make upMonks Eye on two islands: he began
them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish
island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems—which can
be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poets life—are about
the two islands. But theyre also about islands as an archetype, about the
serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping
imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjees collages, the poems
in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past,