This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
Daniela Seel – Nach Eden Review
It is undoubtedly a great honor to translate into German one of the most beautiful songs ever written in the Netherlands and to receive permission from all four lyricists through BUMA. The fact that four lyricists were needed for this brilliant text indicates that something which might seem simple is, in reality, an enormous achievement.
Yodeling can also happen silently, without first swallowing a harmonica. Essentially, one yodels with the soul. It’s often a sign of weakness to even involve the voice.
Ah, yodeling with the soul—what a concept! It almost makes you forget that the average Dutch person does this daily by cycling in the rain despite knowing better.
I get slightly uncomfortable from this color combination. But that was probably the aim of this designer-Eve.
Meanwhile, I read Daniela Seel’s poetry collection Nach Eden, published by Suhrkamp in October 2024.
Ah, Daniela Seel. The poet who transforms poetry into a kind of spiritual IKEA manual, full of words pretending to be profound, but ultimately leaving you empty-handed—surrounded by the disconnected parts of an unintelligible metaphor.
Take, for example, the opening: “Out of a disturbance, a movement, from open spac~e.” This spac~e—with that trendy tilde, as if it adds anything at all. What is Seel trying to say? That language itself is panicking? That the cosmos has suddenly been given vintage branding?
And then there’s Eve. Ah, Eve. In Seel’s hands, Eve becomes a kind of biblical influencer who eats the apple because she knew it would go viral. “Eve knew what she was doing when she ate.” Of course she knew, Daniela. She was hungry. But Seel elevates it to a level where Eve doesn’t just get expelled from paradise; she packs her bags because she’s “ready for growth.” This is poetry that has the tone of a TED Talk about personal responsibility—only without the applause at the end.
And let’s not forget the pseudo-scientific digressions: “A thermocline, haunted by songs of long-extinct whales.” Let’s pause for a moment on these extinct whales, which apparently keep singing in Seel’s imagination. Is this a metaphor for the loss of nature? For the loss of self? Or just an excuse to use the word thermocline? Regardless, it is precisely the sort of poetic nonsense that would fit perfectly in a Greenpeace pamphlet, subtitled: “Think of the whales—even the extinct ones.”
And the second poem: “My child has gifted me my dying.” What’s that supposed to mean? Is dying here a spiritual gift? Or is Seel suggesting that motherhood is a prolonged exercise in dying? Either way, it reads more like the slogan of a macabre concept store than poetry. And then the question: “What would you like to eat, sausages or fish sticks?” It’s as if Seel sprinkles a crumb of relative normalcy, only to bury it under a layer of pretension. Because yes, even a sausage has to carry existential weight in Nach Eden.
Daniela Seel serves up poetry that sounds as though it was written by an algorithm that attended one too many workshops on “healing inner wounds.” Nach Eden is a volume where everything strives to be grand and profound but ultimately drowns in a pretentious soup of meaningless symbolism. It’s not poetry but a monument to what happens when nobody dares to say, “Stop.”
“I wonder whether there’s a complicity between scientific language and the urge to keep a sense of intentionality at bay.”
The poem begins with a question that reads as though it was conceived during a coffee break at a tedious conference, somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation on tidal physics and a workshop titled “How to write academic German that sounds important.” What is she suggesting here? That science dehumanizes the world? That Humboldt was complicit in colonial crimes? Or is she just throwing out a vague accusation to impress readers? It’s a line that promises much but ultimately does nothing.
“When I scroll through the Americas on Google Maps…”
Ah, here we have the pinnacle of modern poetic pretension: the poet as a moral traveler via Google Maps. This image is so absurd that it’s almost brilliant. Humboldt trudged through dense jungles, collected plants, and wrote groundbreaking works on ecology—and what does Seel do? She scrolls through a phone app and has the audacity to put herself in the same lineage. It’s like someone saying, “I feel a deep connection to the ocean because I watched a Netflix documentary about dolphins yesterday.”
And of course, “his own skull just a few hundred meters from here in the family crypt beneath ancient oaks.” Because what would a poem about colonialism and science be without this macabre geographical detail? Why did these oaks have to be ancient? Why couldn’t they be young, unremarkable trees? Because Seel’s poetry always has to be overblown. The ancient oaks aren’t poetic imagery but an unnecessary, inflated effect that makes her texts so unbearable.
Seel doesn’t give us poetry, but a pretentious footnote in verse form, which itself reads like a caricature of her own ambitions.