Wulf Kirsten: erdlebenbilder. gedichte aus 50 jahren 1954-2004. (Ammann Verlag, Zürich. 402pp, h/c, €24.90); Stimmenschotter (Ammann Verlag, Zürich. 102pp, h/c, o.o.p.); Wettersturz (Ammann Verlag, Zürich. 87pp, h/c, o.o.p); Der Berg über der Stadt (Ammann Verlag, 2003).

Kirsten is now in his 70s and comes from the former GDR. His first two Ammann books, now out of print, showed him to be a poet with a terrific ear for sound and rhythm, and to have a real craftsman's skill with language. The Collected Poems, erdlebenbilder, gives us the whole career in a beautiful edition at a very reasonable price. I recommend this volume unreservedly. There are also a novel (Die Prinzessin im Krautgarten) and a volume of essays (Textur) to be had, as well as a book about Buchenwald, Der Berg über der Stadt (Ammann Verlag, 2003, €32.90), with photos by Harald Wenzel-Orf.

Thomas Kling (1957-2005): Gesammelte Gedichte (DuMont, Cologne, 976pp, h/c, isbn 978-3-8321-7977-9; €63.55)

Probably the leading 'experimental' figure in Germany until his tragic early death from cancer in April 2005. All of his books are worth having, but a sensible introduction would be the selected (earlier) poems with the most cumbersome of titles: erprobung herzstärkender mittel / geschmackverstärker / brennstabm / nacht.sicht.gerät (Suhrkamp, 221pp, o/p)—this is simply a splicing together of the titles of his first 4 books, the first of which is very hard to find, not being a Suhrkamp publication. Suhrkamp also published the excellent later collection morsch, which was a further development of his earlier style. His first DuMont collection, Fernhandel (DuMont, Cologne. 102pp, h/c. €19.80), showed him developing his style away from that of the Suhrkamp volumes. That book also came with a CD which usefully allows the reader to hear the poet reading the entire book – particularly valuable given that Kling was famed for his live appearances. Another collection, Sondagen (140pp, h/c, €18.60), appeared from DuMont in 2002, and reflected a partial return to his earlier (poetic) concerns. It too came with a CD of the poet reading the poems. Just after his death a swansong volume appeared (shown above right), that mopped up a number of poems and essays that had not been collected previously: Auswertung der Flugdaten (DuMont, Cologne, 171pp, h/c, €17.90). The collected—shown left—appeared in 2006, and assembled all of his published work, from both trade and bibliophile editions, although excluding one obscure book published when he was only 20. It's a tad expensive, it must be said, but it's cheaper than assembling the individual volumes. A fine monument to a fine poet, edited by Marcel Beyer and Christian Döring.

Uwe Kolbe: Hineingeboren. Gedichte 1975-1979. (Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1980; Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1982. 137pp, pb, o/p); Bornholm II (Aufbau Verlag, 1986; Suhrkamp, 1987. 106pp, pb, o/p); Vineta (Suhrkamp, 1998. 68pp, h/c, €14.80); Die Farben des Wassers (Suhrkamp, 2001. 79pp, h/c, €14.80). These seem to me to be the pick of Kolbe's books. The first caused a sensation when it appeared in the West, and brought that neologism hineingeboren into the language, and the second also had enormous resonance in the then still divided Germany. Kolbe has published three volumes since the Wende, and Vineta seems to me to be the best of them, the elegiac title poem above all.

There is also a five-volume edition of the collected prose from Suhrkamp, some of which could well be regarded as poetry. I confess that I have not seen this edition. The easiest introduction is by way of Benachbarte Metalle (ed. Thomas Kling, Suhrkamp. 158pp, h/c, €12.80), which will do if you can't cope with the huge Collected. In translation we have two volumes of poetic prose: Heiligenanstalt (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop, Burning Deck, Providence, RI) and with each clouded peak (tr. R. Waldrop & Harriet Watts, Sun & Moon, Los Angeles). Both are well worth reading. There has been one volume of Friederike Mayröcker's prose in the USA, from Burning Deck, but precious little of her poetry has seen the light of day in translation. This is set to change, I am delighted to say, with a Selected Poems, translated by Richard Dove, due from Carcanet in 2007. [This is now oput, but I have yet to get hold of copy [Dec. 2007. More when I do.]

Helga M Novak: Silvatica (Schöffling & Co, Frankfurt, 1997, h/c, 96pp, €16.50) and solange Liebesbriefe noch eintreffen: Gesammelte Gedichte (Schöffling, 1999. 809pp, h/c, €29.50).

The latter volume, 800-plus pages long, is a Collected Poems and includes the former. Silvatica is an extraordinary book that uses myth in new ways in German poetry. (Given some of the uses to which myths were put in the past, a recreation of the genre from the ground up was definitely necessary). Also a fine prose-writer, Novak, who lives in Poland, is a poet to be reckoned with. A Selected Poems, edited by Michael Lentz, also appeared from Schöffling in 2005, to mark the poet's seventieth birthday.

Brigitte Oleschinski: Mental Heat Control (Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1990. 61pp, h/c, €14) and Your Passport is not Guilty (Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1997. 59pp, h/c, o/p). Yes, both books have English-language titles. No, I don't know why. Oleschinski is very much the city poet, and a wry observer of contemporary mores, but her poems are short and tightly constructed in long lines. Fascinating and really rather original.

Bert Papenfuß-Gorek: One of only two viable survivors (with Lutz Rathenow) of the Prenzlauer Berg avant-garde scene in 80s East Berlin. His Gesammelte Texte are published by Gerhard Wolf Janus press GmbH of Berlin. Confusingly, they are Vols 1-3 and 5. Since Vol. 5 Papenfuß has published hetze covering poems from 1994-1998, as well as a number of collaborations with artists. I find these hugely difficult, but worth the attention required. All these books appear to have gone out of print, although copies will doubt be obtainable at the branches of the wonderful Autorenbuchhandlung in Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich. A subsequent collection, Rumbalotte, (Poems 1998-2002) has recently (2005) been published by the Engeler press of Basle, as have pendant volumes (Rumbalotte Continua, Karin Kramer Verlag, Berlin, 2005, and another similarly titled that I can't find at the time of writing. The Engeler volume strokes me as a significant publication, and one which consolidates the author's reputation as one of the most interesting poets from the GDR now writing in the merged Republic.

Oskar Pastior (1927-2006): Werkausgabe (4 vols.). As at the author's death, the first three volumes had appeared:- Jetzt kann man schreiben was man will (vol 2, Edition Akzente, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2003. 343pp, pb, €20), Minze Minze flaumiram Schpektrum (vol 3, Edition Akzente, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2004. 344pp, pb, €21.50), and "...sage, du habest es rauschen gehört" (vol 1, Edition Akzente, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2006. 343pp, pb, €24.90).

Vol. 1 prints a selection of the pre-emigration work (the author's first two books appeared in Bucharest) together with the first of the exile publications; until now only a few poems from the pre-emigration period have surfaced in western collections. My only quibble with it is that not all of the contents of the early books have been included. I assume that the author decided to edit some out. Vol. 2 includes the entirety of Gedichtgedichte, Höricht, Fleischeslust, and An die neue Aubergine, retaining all the author's original line-drawings from the latter volume, and also adding a few uncollected texts from the same period (the early 1970s). The third volume includes the essential volumes Wechselbalg and Der krimgotische Fächer (see also below) amongst much else. When the edition is finished, we will finally have an overview of one of the most fascinating postwar German poets. Apart from this recently-initiated collected edition, there is also a good introductory volume, though its selection stops before 1990: Jalousien Aufgemacht. Ein Lesebuch (ed. Klaus Ramm, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002. 234pp, h/c, €17.90).

The Burning Deck edition of Pastior's selected poems, Many Glove Compartments (120pp, pb, $10) is a good place to start for English-speaking readers, including translations and recreations by three wonderful writers: Harry Matthews, Christopher Middleton and Rosmarie Waldrop, each of whom has a fine ear for the delicate playfulness and occasional absurdity of Pastior's work.

The most recent large German collections, apart from the Collected edition referred to above, are Das Hören des Genitivs (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 145pp, h/c, €14.90) and Villanella & Pantum (Carl Hanser Verlag, 112pp, h/c, €13.90). The weirdest book of all (?) is Der Krimgotische Fächer: Lieder und Balladen (Verlag Klaus G. Renner, Erlangen, 1978 — out of print), which purports to consist of texts from a dead Germanic language: Dada meets Arnold Schwerner meets sound poetry, with a little bit of sense thrown in. This is possibly the oddest book of poetry that I've "read". The language does not exist but sounds as if it ought to, and a German-speaker's ear will pick up all manner of nuances, and semantic shadows from his own language, some of them emanating from the author's native dialect in the German-speaking region of Transylvania (at least that's what the author told me!).

Reinhard Priessnitz (1945-1985): Vierundvierzig Gedichte and Texte aus dem Nachlass (ed. Ferdinand Schmatz, Literaturverlag Droschl. Graz & Vienna. 53pp & 250pp, both pb, €9.50 & €23 respectively). Volumes 1 and 4 of the collected works of a poet who died at the age of 40. Very tough, but worth the effort.

Nelly Sachs (1891-1970): The collected poems are available in two volumes from Suhrkamp, entitled Fahrt ins Staublose (386pp, pb, €11.50) and Suche nach Lebenden (177pp, h/c, €16.80). The latter includes many previously uncollected texts. It's unforgivable that there's no proper complete edition — these two books represent a 'collected earlier poems' published in 1961, and a round-up of all the rest, published shortly after the poet's death in 1970. A decent critical edition with uncollected and/or unpublished work is needed; quite frankly, it is shameful that, 30-odd years after her death, there is no critical edition of one of the great German-language poets of the 20th century. Ruth Dinesen's biography is also useful (Nelly Sachs, Suhrkamp paperback) as is the lit-critical introduction Nelly Sachs "an letzter Atemspitze des Lebens" (Bouvier Verlag, Bonn). The correspondence with Celan is an interesting book and has been translated (see also under Celan, previous page).

A two-volume edition of the collected poems in English was promised in 2005 by Green Integer in Los Angeles. I shall report on these books as and when they become available, though at present (late 2007) those volumes have still to appear. It seems that Vol. 1 is imminent, however. In my view, Sachs was one of the most important German poets of the 20th century, and I think it scandalous that there has not yet been a critical edition of her work.

Ferdinand Schmatz: Das grosse Babel,n (Haymon-Verlag, Innsbruck, 1999, 158pp, h/c, o/p). A rewriting and rearrangement of bits of The Bible, the title being a play on Great Babylon and babbling. One of the poems here, 'das grosse babel,n, danach' was memorably translated by Andrew Duncan as Great Babylon and on. A sense of humour has always been useful in reading Austrian experimental work, and this is no exception.

Sabine Scho: Album (published as Thomas Kling entdeckt Sabine Scho, Europa Verlag, Hamburg. 64pp, h/c, €12.90). A first collection by a young (mid-30s) writer of immense promise. The publisher's (re)titling of the book is unfortunate, but it does not undermine the quality of the contents. Scho mixes family history, photographs, song lyrics, quotations, allusions, lullabies, advertising slogans and anything else that's available. The resulting clashing registers and jarring contrasts produce a fascinating and entertaining surface that is quite different from the majority of contemporary German poetry.

Raoul Schrott is a young Austrian poet with a great (and still-developing) reputation, both as a poet and as a novelist. His second poetry collection Tropen (Hanser, Munich; 212pp, h/c, €17.90; paperback edition: Fischer, Frankfurt, €10.90) is a wonderful book, and an artful collage of materials. His first collection Hotels (dtv paperback) is less immediately interesting, but is a useful guide to how he reached his current style. His impressive new collection Weissbuch (Hanser, 2004; 188pp, h/c, €17.90) is in the same style that the author perfected in Tropen, and is a book that I recommend unreservedly. I suppose this could be called experimental-lite: it's not like anyone else's work, but it won't frighten off more conservative readers, if they are prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. Iain Galbraith has translated all of Tropen and Weissbuch, and I hope someone will publish these in the UK or the USA.

In addition to his three poetry collections and various translations, Schrott is also a novelist of some repute (Tristan da Cunha, 2004). In 2000 he published a book which falls somewhere in the middle of the prose/poetry divide, Die Wüste Lop Nor (Hanser, Munich), which is now available in Karen Leeder's fine translation from Picador (isbn 0-330-49153-9, pb, 104pp, £12.99) as The Desert of Lop. A beautiful volume and a good introduction in English to the work of a very talented writer. He has an enormous reputation in the German-speaking lands for his versions/translations of ancient poetries, exemplified by the two large books Die Erfindung der Poesie and Gilgamesch. The latter has a 'straight' translation and a 'poetic' version re-imagined from the tattered version that has come down to us in cuneiform tablets; frankly, both are superior to recent English versions that I've read, where the poetry has been left behind somewhere.

Lutz Seiler: vierzig kilometer nacht (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2003. 93pp, h/c, €16.90); pech & blende (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1999. 90pp, pb, €8.50). Sonntags dachte ich an Gott (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2004, 150pp, pb, €9.00); In the year one. Selected Poems (translated by Tony Frazer; Giramondo Publishing Co., Sydney, Australia, 2005; 93pp, pb, A$20 / £8).  

Seiler's first mainstream volume, pech & blende was a superb book which proved that it was possible to write poems out of memory and landscape without descending to the trite levels that one is accustomed to in much British poetry. Some of the biographical underpinnings to this book are related in the three-handed book Heimaten (with Anne Duden & Farhad Showghi, ed. H L Arnold, Göttinger Südelblätter, Göttingen. 47pp, pb, €14). I have translated this text, which has since been collected in the author's first book of essays, Sonntags dachte ich an Gott, an excellent volume which provides useful background for any reader of the poems. Seiler's second collection of poems, vierzig kilometer nacht appeared in 2003. This is a major collection that everyone interested in contemporary German poetry should have. It is difficult, very difficult in places, a fact to which I can testify as a result of my struggles to get the poems into an acceptable form of English, BUT the work is very rewarding indeed, offering what would appear to be a unique style of poetry.

Before publishing any of these books, Seiler co-edited the little magazine moosbrand, of which the last three issues still seem to be available via www.amazon.de.

My translation of some poems from each of the two Suhrkamp collections appeared in May 2005 from Giramondo in Sydney. Although this was only produced in a small run, copies are obtainable from Glee Books of Sydney or from Giramondo itself in Australia, and from Shearsman Books direct in the UK.

Peter Waterhouse: passim (Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1987. 111pp, h/c, o/p); Prosperos Land (Jung und Jung, Salzburg / Vienna, 2001. 201pp, h/c, €19.90).

Anglo-Austrian poet Peter Waterhouse is a very singular figure. The two books here are in radically different styles, passim being from the early part of his career, and very much in the Austrian experimental tradition, while Prosperos Land is the latest book and is very spare indeed, with much white space and nary a word wasted. There are other books to investigate but these are a good place to start. The more I read Prosperos Land, the more impressed I am by this work.

ANTHOLOGIES

New Writing in German (Chicago Review Vol. 48 Issues 2/3, Summer 2002. 354pp, pb, $8. General Editor, Eirik Steinhoff; Fiction Editors, William Martin & Anna Gisbertz; Poetry Editors, Andrew Duncan & Tony Frazer). Very recent and intended to be very contemporary, this selection is currently out on its own in terms of an overview of what's happening. Yes, I was one of the poetry editors & thus I'm biased, but this is a case of putting your money where your mouth is. Poets included are Becker, Beyer, Czernin, Draesner, Erb, Falkner, Göritz, Grünbein, Haufs, Jackson, Kling, Köhler, Kolbe, Mayröcker, Novak, Oleschinski, Ostermaier, Pastior, Scho, Schrott, Seiler, Speier, Waterhouse, most of whom have individual volumes listed on these two pages. The price is astoundingly low. Available from the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin for €15. Within the USA you'll need to add $4 to the cover price for postage. Currently unavailable in the UK. Postscript: dec. 2007. The volume may well be out of print by now, but used copies can be found through Abebooks.

Charlotte Melin (ed): German Poetry in Transition 1945-1990 (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH, & London, 1999. 381pp, pb, £18.95, $24.95). Good bilingual introduction to the field. The translations are workmanlike rather than inspired but the job the book sets out to do is done rather well. From a current perspective, it seems odd to label 45 years of history as being 'transition', given that this denigrates the GDR's poetic output in particular. Whatever one thinks of that awful régime, a lot of fine poetry was written by its citizens.

Michael Braun & Hans Thill (eds): Das verlorene Alphabet: Deutschsprachige Lyrik der neunziger Jahre (Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg, 1998. 256pp, h/c, €25.80). Pluralist anthology covering the whole field, which probably means it upsets everybody. Poorly laid out, with spurious (& utterly irritating) thematic divisions, it nonetheless has something by just about all the poets worth reading from the 90s and should be on any bookshelf that needs a survey of currrent German verse.

Kurt Drawert (ed): Lagebesprechung. Junge Deutsche Lyrik. (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2001. 189pp. pb, €8.00). No real surprises in this book, which contains recent work by 31 poets. Of the more unusual names I was pleased to see Michael Donhauser and Ulf Stolterfoht selected. Aside from the usual suspects there are also some very young writers, such as Silke Scheuermann (barely out of her twenties), who are just beginning to make names for themselves. For that reason alone this book, a very cheap paperback, is worth having.

Thomas Kling (ed): Sprachspeicher (DuMont, Cologne, 2001. 360pp, pb, €14.90). Although this covers the entire history of poetry in the German language, from the 8th to the 20th centuries, the selection of modern writers is fascinating. The very early poems come with modern German translations.

Lyrik. Über Lyrik. (Merkur no. 600, March/April 1999, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, edited by Karl Heinz Bohrer and Kurt Scheel. 204pp, pb, €16 approx.) This was a one-off issue of a serious literary journal, devoted entirely to contemporary German poetry, and a very fine edition it is. The sonnets by Czernin are worth the price of the book alone (see previous page for the new volume that collects these poems).

CRITICAL

There is a lack of worthwhile criticism in English, but one good introduction to part of the scene is:

Karen Leeder: Breaking Boundaries. A New Generation of Poets in the GDR. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996. 369pp, h/c. Price ca £40). Very well written and very well informed, neither of which descriptions always applies to academic studies of this type. It would be useful to see a book covering the post-Wende period. There are a couple of collections of essays on this subject in Germany, but an outsider's view would also help. In German there is a veritable avalanche of comment available, much of which is unreadable and intended only for an academic audience, and I will forbear going through the small part of it that I'm really familiar with. Let's just say that it's worth tracking issues of the journal Text + Kritik (ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold), which has done (and continues to do) a fine job in taking contemporary writing seriously.

German Poets A-J

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