Het Spaarne stroomt

De Zingende Zaag; Haarlem, 2004

I' ask of poetry no more than to map that river'.

Commissioned by the Haarlem City Library, George Moormann compiled a publication on Haarlem's city river: Het Spaarne stroomt helemaal niet (The Spaarne doesn't flow at all). The reason for this commission was that the City Library owns a quantity of material about the Spaarne, which hardly comes to the attention of the public.
It resulted in an unusually designed bun- del, 258 pages with hard cover and reading ribbon, which brings together 400 years of poetry and prose about the 4,000-year-old Haarlem city river.
The book contains all kinds of information about poets‘ and writers’ houses, flora and fauna you may encounter along the Spaarne, meanings of the river in dream books, striking archi- tecture, statues and other places of interest, but above all poetry and also prose, most of which was written especially for this volume. In doing so, the poems included in the book have a variety of variations. Song lyrics, academic poetry and light verse are some examples. The poems and prose fragments are concentrated as much as possible around the various places along Het Spaarne.