Jozef Deleu was born on 20 April 1937 in Roeselare. Deleu is an important figure in the cultural life of Flanders. He set himself the task of distributing Dutch-language culture, and particularly the art and literature of the Dutch-speaking community, and in 1957 launched Ons Erfdeel, a magazine that functions as a hyphen that connects Flanders and The Netherlands. He is a man of dialogue, but knew how to guard his independance so when the situation needed it, he could be a public intellectual that manifested itself as a writer of essays, open letters and polemical texts that attacked everything that went wrong in cultural and artistic life in Flanders and The Netherlands. In 2002 Deleu left Ons Erfdeel as a managing editor, but he soon founded a new poetry magazine Het Liegend Konijn (The Lying Rabbit). This journal does not publish critical essays or reviews, but offers a platform for prepublications and work-in progress of known and lesser known Dutch-language poets. Jozef Deleu is also famous as the composer of Groot Gezinsverzenboek, a regularly revised and expanded anthology of more than 600 poems on the important stages of life. The book is an everseller.
Deleu’s poetry is lesser known than Deleu himself. That is due to the fact that the public figure often put the poetry in the shadow, but also due to his intentional choice for a classic form and an intimistic atmosphere. As no other Deleu knows how to create whole universa with a couple of well-chosen words and to load them with a symbolic worth. In his poems life’s fundamental experiences as love or death are evoked by tableaus and snapshots that in their scarce wording get an emblematic character. Often the closing words make the poem topple over which intensifies the suspense of the reader.
Foto © Sven van Baarle