The leading critic and poet Piet Gerbrandy wrote of Ter Balkt’s poetry that it ‘is characterised by a freedom that has seldom been equalled in our language area.’ He also highlighted how artfully Ter Balkt incorporated reality (the historical and the contemporary) into his work. Ter Balkt wrote about this: ‘The poem is never autonomous. And it can’t be because it is part of the world, not of the underworld, or from the workshop of the joyless makers. It must be in, and of, the world or it won’t be anything at all.’

And in this world that is per definition changeable, Ter Balkt’s work was subject to change too. He re-wrote a fair number of poems, often drastically. This doesn’t indicate, as Gerbrandy explains in his essay, that the poems in their published form were not good enough, but that they have to be seen as part of the historical process that they themselves comment on. He represented a unique and entirely original voice in Dutch poetry.

As Ter Balkt wrote in the poem ‘Shredding Machines on the Horizon’, from his final collection Vliegtuigmagneet (Airplane Magnet, 2011), nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize: ‘On the horizon the shredding machines rehash unnoticed what falls into them.’ To conclude after sublime sentences and images about changeability and stasis with: ‘The constellation glitters / of what must endure, of the world and us.’