5 July 2026. Today, the remarkable review zoals een spiegel zichzelf niet spiegelt by Marc van Oostendorp was published on the website of Neerlandistiek. In it, he discusses Rozalie Hirs’ new poetry collection vragen naar het begin (Amsterdam: Querido, 2026).
He opens the review with:
“Vragen naar het begin by Rozalie Hirs is my favourite poetry collection of the year. It shows that it is possible to write poetry about highly abstract subjects — such as reality, language, and the relationship between language and reality — in a way that is truly beautiful. Here, the beauty of art is combined with the beauty of mathematics, in the way Wittgenstein brought the two together in philosophy.”
He concludes:
“Rozalie Hirs is a poet who devotes everything she has to her work: her thoughts, her feel for language, her sense of rhythm, her fascination with clarity of thought, and her concerns for and love of this world. She has already written a remarkable number of beautiful collections, but with vragen naar het begin she has, in my view, surpassed herself.”
Read the full review (in Dutch) on Neerlandistiek (5 July 2026). For non-Dutch readers, an English translation is provided below.
“Rozalie Hirs’s vragen naar het begin is my favourite poetry collection of the year. It shows that it is possible to write poetry about highly abstract subjects — such as reality, language, and the relationship between language and reality — in a way that is genuinely beautiful. Here, the beauty of art is combined with that of mathematics, in the way Wittgenstein did in philosophy.
There are also a few more concrete poems, with highly precise images and words that can only be regarded as beautiful. “Door het park” (“Through the Park”), for example, ends with the following stanza:
onwerkelijk – hoe dit pad oplicht langs eik en iep
van muskuskaasjes- en boskruiskruid zo vol
But these lines are highly atypical of the collection as a whole. More than half of the book is devoted to a section entitled “Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Meditations).” Like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the poems in this section are numbered and contain numerous references, particularly to that work.
Near the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes that anyone who has understood his book correctly must realise that it is ultimately nonsense, and must throw away the ladder by which they have climbed up. But Hirs has taken the fragments of that broken ladder and transformed them into a work of art. Poem 42, “zoals de wereld ons draagt” (“as the world carries us”), contains a clear paraphrase:
het zegbare toont het onzegbare helder op de grens –
alles wat gedacht wordt kan helder gedacht worden –
alles wat gezegd wordt kan helder gezegd –
wat taal deelt met de wereld blijft buiten taal
zoals een spiegel zichzelf niet spiegelt en ogen zichzelf niet zien
stappen we niet buiten de grenzen die de taal stelt –
buiten is een plaats die onuitspreekbaar blijft –
terwijl de vorm verschijnt zoals de wereld ons draagt –
niet benoemt –
This is an abstract poem in the sense that it works with large concepts such as “the unsayable” and “the form.” Even when a more concrete word appears, such as mirror, it is used metaphorically rather than made tangible (there is no “fogged-up IKEA mirror,” for example). At the same time, the poem reaches the reader through the clarity it creates and through the simplicity of its formulations, which attempt to express something profoundly complex.
For Wittgenstein, the idea that a sentence is a picture of reality was fundamental: the structure of a sentence corresponds, in an abstract way, to the structure of the part of reality it describes. There are things that cannot be said, but “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or one must write poetry, as Hirs demonstrates: a way of not so much describing things as showing them.
What does she show, then? Among other things, fragmentation. Wittgenstein would later abandon his entire project — the attempt to transform philosophy into a system of logical formulas — and become more interested in the things that could not be expressed in that way. In a sense, he was the first to smash his own ladder.
In “Wittgenstein’s Ladder,” this fragmentation appears through the use of thought dashes. Apart from a single question mark, these are the only punctuation marks Hirs uses in the collection, as in the passage quoted above and in the poem discussed earlier. They separate sentences and sentence fragments without creating a logical connection between them. What emerges is that, precisely in this broken form, the clear thoughts become even clearer.
An interesting detail is that readers have become increasingly aware of the use of thought dashes in recent years because they have become a characteristic feature of AI-generated prose. I know several writers who have started using them less frequently because they do not want to give the impression that technological tools have played a role in their writing. But Hirs shows that even such a small mark can be given new meaning through human creativity.
Rozalie Hirs is a poet who devotes everything she has to her work: her thoughts, her feel for language, her sense of rhythm, her fascination with clarity of thought, and her concerns for and love of this world. She has already written many beautiful collections, but with vragen naar het begin she has, in my view, surpassed herself.”
– Marc van Oostendorp, Neerlandistiek, 5 July 2026