Esther Jansma (1958-2025)
We were deeply saddened by news of the death of the eminent Dutch poet and archaeologist Esther Jansma.
In 2004 she took part in the Writing on the Wall project, a five-year international programme involving writers from the north of England, Scotland and countries which originally garrisoned Hadrian’s Wall. Francis R. Jones’s translation, What It Is: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), was the first in English of her work, drawing on all the collections she had published in the Netherlands at that time, and including poems inspired by parts of Hadrian’s Wall where Friesian and Schelt Auxiliaries were stationed.
Interweaving a dazzling variety of strands, Esther Jansma's poetry explores time and memory, past and present, death, loss, decay and legacy, and yet draws fresh power from these perennial themes because she writes from two opposite but complementary viewpoints. As an archaeologist she refined a technique for establishing the age of wooden artefacts from growth-rings in the wood which could be applied to timber from The Netherlands. Lending a voice to the past, making time visible in all its aspects, is also what she does in her poetry. The philosophical is earthed in the everyday, the mythic intertwines with the mundane, the word with the world.
In her early work, the voices of the past are heard from bewildering years: as a child, the death of a father, then as a mother, the loss of a child. Her later poetry is less personal but more compelling as her poetic universe expands, embracing the whole world.
Her Bloodaxe selection is prefaced with an authoritative account of her work by Francis R. Jones. She told Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley that she thought Jones's translations were quite extraordinary in how he'd able to recreate the sounds and rhythms of her Dutch poems in English as well evoking her tone and style without sacrificing any of the meaning. She chose her book's highly appropriate cover painting, Nürnberg (1982) by Anselm Kiefer.
Esther Jansma was born in 1958 in Amsterdam, and lived in Utrecht. She studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, obtaining her doctorate for research in dendrochronology. She worked for many years as an archaeologist with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, founding the Centre for Dendrochronology in 1993, and was professor of dendrochronology at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University. In 2024 she was knighted for her work as a dendrochronologist, appointed a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (the Dutch equivalent of a British damehood), partly for her research into the Dutch part of the Roman Limes, the border defences of the Roman Empire. She won several awards for her poetry, and read her work at many international festivals.
She died from cancer at a hospice in Utrecht on Thursday, aged 66.
Esther Jansma reads seven of her poems from What It Is in Dutch as well as in Francis R. Jones’s English translation in this short film, made by Neil Astley during Jansma’s visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2011. Her introductions help illuminate the background to many of the poems, including an explanation of how the hare (haas) in the poem ‘Uitzicht’ became a swift in English. The Dutch texts are from Altijd vandaag (De Arbeiderspers, 2006). The poems are: ‘Schrödingers vangst’ (‘Schrödinger’s catch’), ‘Dat ze er was en toen niet meer…’ (‘That she was there and then no more…’), ‘Uitzicht’ (‘Swift’), ‘Archeologie’ (‘Archaeology’), ‘Aanwezigheid’ (‘Presence’), ‘Alles is nieuw’ (‘Everything is new’), and ‘De verzamelaar’ (‘The collector’). This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (2017).
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The following excepts from three tributes published in Dutch and Belgian press were kindly translated by Francis R. Jones:
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Writer and scientist: Esther Jansma loved trees as much as words
by Geertjan de Vugt, De Volkskrant, Amstersdam, 24 January 2025 [click here for original text in Dutch]
Professor and poet Esther Jansma, who died on Thursday at the age of 66, was the author of over a dozen books – poetry collections, prose and essays – and an acclaimed academic. In November, she was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion for her scientific and literary work. But don't let that praise give the impression of bliss. Her life was marked by the early loss of two children. First her daughter died at birth, and five years later her nine-month-old son died too. Poetry was a means to keep them alive. ‘I wrap her in tissues of words’, Jansma wrote about her daughter, ‘I want her to breathe with language.’
Jansma was born on 24 December 1958, the daughter of two sculptors: Adam Jansma and Nel van Lith. Her father died in an accident when Jansma was six years old. Her mother tormented her. So she had a far from happy childhood. Perhaps that is why she started writing poetry at an early age: she wrote her first poem at the age of 12. ‘I wanted to write something that was about the world, that was dangerous, but also beautiful and grand.’
Later she would recall those attempts to get something on paper. It had to be about nature, she remembered, ‘about trees that grew over each other. I wanted to write something about the world, that was dangerous, but also beautiful and grand.’ As a student, she initially followed her interest in philosophy, but she gave up her studies. However, the minor she had chosen during that period, archaeology, had aroused her interest. Not much later, she decided to dedicate her studies to that. And when she found a Roman writing tablet during fieldwork, she suddenly realised that not the coins, not the pottery, but the wood had to be a key to the past. She did not want to speculate about the century in which a potsherd would have been created, but to measure exactly when the tree had grown from which a piece of wood had come. Wood, that was the building material for a long time. It was soft, fragile and full of information.
Jansma worked for the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands for a long time. She investigated, among other things, the Roman ships De Meern 1 and 4. She started building an international, online archive for dendrochronology in 2006. In 1993 she founded the Centre for Dendrochronology. Three years later she obtained her doctorate cum laude with her thesis RemembeRINGs. In 2007 Jansma was appointed professor of dendrochronology at the Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University. As professor of dendrology she was involved in measuring the growth rings in wood, something that at first glance does not exactly seem like poetry. But for the professor and poet science and poetry were closely related. The patterns she found in the wood, the rhythm, all of that gave her the same sensation as writing a good line: ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Jansma made her debut in 1988 with Stem onder mijn bed [Voices under my bed]. She then published a new collection every three or four years. And in 1999 she received the VSB Poetry Prize for Hier is de tijd [Time is here], which had been published a year earlier, the provisional highlight of her career as a poet. That collection was immediately considered a classic.
She wrote accessible poetry, which never became simplistic. Jansma's poetry has an intimate approach, is often very personal. At the same time, traces of her scientific work flow effortlessly into her verses. Even more than the omnipresent death in her life, time is the subject of her poetry. She thought and wrote about the origin, about the Big Bang for example, 'that first split', which we were not there for, just as we are not there for the last breath. She could be generous: colleagues she had just met, and with whom she felt a kinship, she regarded almost immediately, and sometimes to the surprise of the people themselves, as good friends. At the same time, she was also critical, very critical, of the literary business. Jansma regularly pointed out the gender inequality in, for example, the awarding of literary prizes. Friends, family and poetry lovers witnessed Jansma's final phase of life last year. Six months ago, she performed at the Johan Polak Poetry Prize, organised by her husband, with a fragile body and at least as fragile a voice. The poet she once was was barely recognisable. In a long series of messages on social media, she reflected on her illness and her approaching death. In doing so, she invariably addressed her small self, her ‘Little Esther’. Call it a last attempt to keep a grip on the life that was ebbing away from her. Her real farewell is We moeten ‘misschien’ blijven denken [We must keep thinking ‘maybe’], her eleventh and final collection, which was published shortly before her death. ‘You can also get smaller in other ways,’ she writes there, ‘break an egg, invent a beginning that / that is an end.’ And she adds: ‘Break yourself into something that sings.’
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Poet Esther Jansma (66) passed away
NOS News, 23 January 2025 [click here for original text in Dutch]
Writer, poet and professor of dendrochronology Esther Jansma has passed away, her publisher Prometheus, where she published her eleventh and final collection of poems in November, confirmed. She died in a hospice in her hometown of Utrecht from cancer. She was 66 years old.
She grew up with a twin sister, two younger sisters and a brother in a communist artist family, in a two-room apartment in Amsterdam. Her parents were sculptors, but her father died in a car accident when she was six. She was a bright child, she later said. 'I lived very much in my head. I was always reading, in the toilet, in bed.'
Her parents looked with disdain at people who did not do art. 'They were worthless, potato sacks,' the children were told. She later looked back on this with horror, as well as her mother's communist dogmas, but nevertheless became an artist herself. Her own artistry blossomed when she went to work as an au pair in Paris at the age of 18 and discovered poetry. 'There I noticed that I could give a great twist to reality through writing.'
She made her debut in 1988 with the collection Stem onder mijn bed [Voices under my bed]. Two years later, the autobiographical Bloem, steen [Flower, stone] about a stillborn child, followed. Death and transience remained an important theme in her work. As a young mother, she lost two children. A daughter died in 1988 during birth, a son died in 1993 after nine months from a chromosomal abnormality.
After the death of her son, she went on to do a PhD. 'That was of course a kind of escape. I became a workaholic, just like my husband, Casper, who became an architect at that time.' Later they had two more children, who did survive. The marriage with Casper did not last.
In 1998 she published death poems for her son, sometimes with a grim tone: 'Oh child, elves are weak and they die like crazy and we, we already forget how full the light once fell on you, how you lie here, this silent now full of you, so much yourself and gone, goddammit, gone.'
She said that she wrote poetry quickly and that inspiration played no part. 'Inspiration is a fabrication. You start by writing one line, even if it's bad. You try something and then you interact with it." The poems were often autobiographical. The inspiration could be a dream image, a memory or something she picked up.
In 2015, she wrote a novel, The Messiah, together with her second husband, professor of modern literature Wiljan van den Akker. In analogy with 'Nicci French', they did so under a pen name: Julian Winter. The Messiah is the name of a violin from 1716 by Stradivarius. In the novel, a scientist examines the wood of the violin top, after which it turns out that the violin has a dark past.
Esther Jansma was also an archaeologist. She was the scientific director of the Netherlands Centre for Dendrochronology Foundation. Dendrochronologists investigate the age and origin of wood, and often try to discover something about the lives of people centuries ago. She was also a special professor of dendrochronology and paleoecology at Utrecht University.
In 2008, she said that science and poetry were closely linked. 'When I write a poem, I follow the same method as an archaeologist. I fit shards together, I slide words together, I can reconstruct a tree from splinters, just as I build a poem from separate images. The coherence arises through poetry or research.' She said that tree stumps dating back eight thousand years had been found in a field in Drenthe, 'the remains of the oldest forest in the Netherlands!'
Two months ago she was knighted for her work as a dendrochronologist. She was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, partly for her research into the Dutch part of the Roman Limes, the border of the Roman Empire
That same month, her last collection of poems, We moeten ‘misschien’ blijven denken [We must keep thinking ‘maybe’], was published. She saw it as the 'charged conclusion' of her oeuvre, in which she describes how her life falls apart. 'The end is a lot of fuss / we just live / or is this how a ship sinks,' she wrote.
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Esther Jansma (1958-2025): the poet and scientist who put language and trees under the microscope
Paul Demets, De Standaard, Antwerp, 23 January 2025 [click here for original text in Dutch]
Esther Jansma was a scientist who studied trees and a poet who resisted the notion of transience. She died on Thursday from cancer.
The image on the cover of Voor altijd ergens [Forever somewhere], the selection that Dutch poet Esther Jansma compiled from her own work in 2015, speaks volumes. We see a field of flowers, with threatening clouds behind it. The image sums up her work: personal emotions are placed in a broader perspective, free from romance, sentiment and navel-gazing. And there is always a threat in the background.
Jansma, who was born in Amsterdam on 24 December 1958, not only wrote an important literary oeuvre, consisting mainly of poetry, but also of prose and essays. She was also a professor of dendrochronology and paleoecology at Utrecht University. She developed a much-consulted international digital archive for dendrochronology. In November 2024, Jansma was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion and honoured for her scientific work and for her poetry.
Become
There is water everywhere and everything sings, clouds
moving in the depths of puddles
on streets that do not know the clouds
and heaven knows nothing of earth
fingertips of trees, which are made of feeling
that dies in the fall and is still there now
are sound boxes for all those fingers of rain
people and someone are hiding everywhere
walks through time that has almost disappeared
cold water tapping on the face
and know; the clouds know not of the rain
the water doesn't know about the leaves
from which it beats the music, rhythms, language
and the quick silver touches
which are called life and movement
don't know the drops on my face
and soon I will be all of this.
from We moeten ‘misschien’ blijven denken
[We must keep thinking 'maybe']
(Prometheus, Amsterdam/Antwerp, 2024)
What connections can we make between her work, in which she studied trees that were hundreds of years old, and her poetry? If we had to characterise Jansma's work in one word, it could be 'resilience'. In an interview in 1988, she said: 'Perhaps that is my personal approach to both writing and science: resistance to a deep sense of powerlessness.' It is about the intense sense of transience. Jansma does not want to accept that. She wants to penetrate things, like she puts pieces of wood under a microscope. She wants to understand. Language is her instrument for this. She wants to be resilient. But Jansma also realises that language cannot exorcise and explain everything. She had to overcome many obstacles in her life. In her poem 'Absence' from Dakruiters [Skylights] (2000) we read: 'Like roses open, you don't see it, / a rose is a rose, is suddenly knowing: / what was said says itself again, missing / is multiple, keeps opening up in the now.' Jansma lost two children and experienced the loss firsthand. Her second collection Bloem, steen [Flower, stone] (1990) was about that loss. But she soon realised that the resilience of language also lies in distancing itself, in addition to empathy. Gertrude Stein wrote 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose'. By repeating in language you can conjure: 'what was said speaks again, we read in Jansma.
In her later work, Jansma took a stand against her violent, destructive mother, using the language of staging and transformation. In her collection De spronglaag [The jump layer] (2022), we read about 'Bloody Lilly, the roaring captain' who neglects and humiliates her children. These lines of verse read like a nursery rhyme, but you can easily see the dark clouds above: 'The child in the box/ the box with the curtains/ the airtight curtains/ the legs in the night/ the wolves in the dark/ they dig through the dark.'
The title of her latest collection, We moeten ‘misschien’ blijven denken [We must keep thinking ‘maybe’] (2024), suggests that we must keep thinking and keep doubting in order to survive. That is our form of resilience. Because 'the clouds do not know about the rain / the water does not know about the leaves / from which it beats music, rhythms, language'. We must constantly reinvent ourselves, we already read in her collection Hier is de tijd [Time is here] (1998).
Esther Jansma's work is on the same high level of quality as that of poets Eva Gerlach, Anneke Brassinga or Astrid Lampe. Those poets did receive the PC Hooft Prize, which is more or less the Dutch State Prize. In the last years of her life, Jansma pointed out several times that this prize had so far been awarded very few times to women authors. Her work should have been valued more, even though she was awarded the VSB Poetry Prize, the Jan Campert Prize and the Roland Holst Medal. But the greatest reward is of course that we continue to read her work.
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Esther Jansma: born Amsterdam, 24 December 1958; died Utrecht, 23 January 2025
[25 January 2025]
