Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001
A publishing landmark—the first major collection of poems by one of the late twentieth century’s literary masters German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that The Guardian called “a new literary...
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A publishing landmark—the first major collection of poems by one of the late twentieth century’s literary masters German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that The Guardian called “a new literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir, part travelogue.” Its publication put Sebald in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Yet Sebald’s brilliance as a poet has been largely unacknowledged—until now. Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, the nearly one hundred poems in Across the Land and the Water range from those Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. Featuring eighty-eight poems published in English for the first time and thirty-three from unpublished manuscripts, this collection also brings together all the verse he placed in books and journals during his lifetime. Here are Sebald’s trademark themes—from nature and history (“Events of war within/a life cracks/across the Order of the World/spreading from Cassiopeia/a diffuse pain reaching into/the upturned leaves on the trees”), to wandering and wondering (“I have even begun/to speak in foreign tongues/roaming like a nomad in my own/town . . .”), to oblivion and memory (“If you knew every cranny/of my heart/you would yet be ignorant/of the pain my happy/memories bring”). Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to his superb body of work, and this unique collection is bound to become a classic in its own right.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781400068906 (1400068908)
Publish date: March 27th 2012
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Pages no: 192
Edition language: English
Nothing much to say about this book other than Sebald's own wish to remembered for his prose. These bits were mostly just pen put to paper, a recording of words more reportage than anything resembling fine poetry.
Unlike a lot of people whose introduction to the writing of W.G. Sebald was through books such as Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, or Vertigo, mine was through the Micropoems in Unrecounted, a slim volume of thirty three poems, with accompanying lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp. So when I saw this Selecte...