A Reckoning in Flame: On Gerardus Cornielje's Duende

Let's not begin with politeness. Let's not call Duende a "collection of poems" as if it might sit politely between coffee and errands, waiting for your attention like a potted plant. Let's tell the truth: Duende is an event. It is a storm system made of language. It is what poetry becomes when it stops trying to be liked and starts trying to survive.

Gerardus Baron von Sachsen, the Dutch-born polymath behind this book, has produced something that doesn't merely demand to be read-it demands to be endured. And if you have the courage to endure it, it will reward you in the only currency that matters: transformation.

A Masterpiece of Structure-Built Like a Cathedral

At first glance, Duende stuns with its mathematical ambition. The book is composed of fifteen Heroic Crowns of Sonnets, and for those unfamiliar with this rare and formidable form, let's spell it out: each crown contains fourteen sonnets, each linked by repeating the final line of one sonnet as the first of the next. This looping form is then capped by a fifteenth "master sonnet," composed from the first lines of the previous fourteen. It's a poetic ouroboros. A self-swallowing ritual. And Cornielje does this fifteen times.

That's not all. Every sonnet in this book obeys a strict 4-4-3-3 structure-a reinvention of the Petrarchan model. Each poem is a crucible of control: four lines, four lines, three, and three. While many contemporary poets wear form like an itchy sweater, von Sachsen wears it like armour. You get the sense he needed this structure to hold the wildness within. This is what form was built for: to hold fire.

227 Sonnets, 1 Reckoning

The numbers are staggering. Two hundred twenty-seven sonnets in total: 225 sonnets across the fifteen crowns, bookended by a Prologue and Epilogue that read more like spells than sonnets. These are not warm introductions and farewells. They are warnings. The Prologue dares you to open the book; the Epilogue refuses to let you go. In between, you are inside something closer to a liturgical cycle than a literary one. A cathedral of echo and ash.

But Duende is more than the sum of its structure. It is a journey through history, myth, art, silence, blood, and something far more ineffable: the thing that Lorca called duende.

It is not a mood. Not a feeling. Not a muse.

As Lorca wrote, duende is the spirit that rises not from heaven, but from the ground-from the grave, from the groin, from that mysterious darkness we carry in our guts. It appears when something vital is at stake. When art is no longer decoration but salvation. When death is not a metaphor but a companion.

"All that has black sounds has duende." - Manuel Torre

Gerardus takes that definition seriously. In fact, he builds the entire book around it. Each crown becomes a different iteration of possession. Duende appears again and again, but never in the same clothes. Sometimes it's a Spanish soldier whispering in a trench. Sometimes it's a flamenco dancer bleeding through her shoes. Sometimes it's a child's prayer. Sometimes it's the rope of the Inquisition.

You cannot separate Duende from the life of its author. Gerardus is not an armchair poet. He has lived in the landscapes he evokes with such eerie clarity. He spent four years in Andalusia, drifting between Málaga and Tangiers, absorbing the music, the smells, the violence, and the longing that saturates southern Spain. He played jazz saxophone in Moroccan clubs. He walked the halls of ruined mosques and silent churches. He knows duende of this region because it entered him the only way it can: through experience.