Sedert sy debuut in 1969 met die bundel Orpheushanden het Leonard Nolens hom gevestig as een van die beduidendste Vlaamse digters van ons tyd. Drie versamelbundels het reeds van sy omvangryke oeuvre verskyn en sy poesie het talle Vlaamse en Nederlandse pryse ontvang, onder meer die Jan Campert- en Constantijn Huygens-pryse, die VSB-prys en die Prijs der Nederlandse letteren. Vir hierdie versameling Afrikaanse vertalings het Daniel Hugo veral gekies uit gedigte oor Antwerpen, die stad waar Nolens woon en werk; die agtergrond van talle gedigte wat soms ook as stilswyende gespreksgenoot vir die digter optree. Die ander durende gespreksgenoot is sy geliefde. Leonard Nolens is 'n liefdesdigter sonder gelyke in die moderne Nederlandse letterkunde. Nolens skryf ook oor onderwerpe soos musiek, ander Europese lande en oor die mens se stryd om met homself tot 'n vergelyk te kom.

`I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in `Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity. Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. `We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight’, he writes in the selection’s central sequence `Breach’. Nolens’ poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.