From the very beginning, Duinker’s poetry has always been about the reality of flowers, stones, mountains, rain, wind, ivy, rivers, the reality of things as separate self-contained entities. That is: all these things as they exist without the interposition of human, all-too-human thought, without the interposition of the abstractions that rear their heads as soon as a human opens his mouth. In his second collection, Loose Poems (1990), we read:

‘If you give me abstractions,
I’ll give you
a fan of wood’

and:

‘Nothing is more foreign to me than belief,
Nothing is more foreign to me than emotional connection through thought.’

What he wants is that:

‘of things
the very things become visible.’

In his collections to date he has consistently tried to shed his own personality, essence and baggage in order to smuggle into his poems the things he experiences without thinking: the effortlessness, the self-evidence of things like flowers and stones. In every poem it’s as if the poet is, to quote from ‘The Dreaming Hour’: ‘body-searched by uninterpreted nonhuman reality’.

The poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.