Quatrains & other short poems

The delightful short poems of French poet Robert Notenboom are reflections on life, love, God, death and growing old. They are the words of someone who has lived through tumultuous times and has come to terms with the inevitable fact that lives, like the seasons, come and go, and that the most important thing that any of us can hope to achieve is a sense of peace and understanding of ourselves. Roberts poems triumphantly reflect the life that he has lived and the man that he is. Reading the poems, hearing the voice, in Quatrains & other short poems is like hearing time itself singing a song of the passing of years.

Robert Notenboom was born in Paris in 1931 to a German mother and a Dutch father. He did not speak French until 1939 and had a difficult and lonely childhood. It was only at the age of 21 that he took French nationality. He has published numerous books of poetry, also fiction and non-fiction, in French, all in the 21st century. Quatrains & other short poems is his first book in English. Paraphrasing Jean Prouvé, Robert likes to say of his writing that “every word that is not indispensable is harmful”.