Eyewear is very pleased to feature Cralan Kelder (pictured) this Good Friday.I met him in Berlin late last year at the Hearings 2006 festival put together by Alistair Noon. Cralan is a unique performer - erudite, erratic, engaged, empathetic, engaging, expressionist, entertaining, and ultimately, enthusiastic. He had the audience enraptured by the end. He's the Kelder Statesman of European Continental poetry.
Kelder was born in London in 1970, but spent the first fifteen years of his life in California, before moving to the Netherlands in 1985. He studied anthropology and agricultural development in St. Andrews and at UC Davis, then conducted development work and research in Lesotho and Nambia.
His beautiful poetry collections include Lemon Red (Coracle 2005) and Night Falls and Is Slow to Get Up (Longhouse 2005). French Pastry will be released as a broadside by Coracle in 2007. In Amsterdam he is a member of wordsinhere writing collective and the poetry editor of Versal http://versal.wordsinhere.com. His website is http://www.cralan.com and is recommended.
French Pastry
Driving through Wyoming,
I see my first ‘boycott france’
bumper sticker.
By some great stroke of luck
we actually have a croissant
in the truck, and I am prepared
to throw it.
Imagine their surprise,
to have a croissant hurled down at them
from a passing pickup,
leaving a light, buttery, imprint
on their windshield.
But they are too fast uphill in their sedan and
I have to hope that we will see them again,
parked somewhere down the road, maybe at a rest stop,
so that I can gently and firmly tuck
my french pastry beneath their wipers.
poem by Cralan Kelder
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