Across the land and the water : selected poems, 1964-2001

Format:

Book

Title:

Across the land and the water : selected poems, 1964-2001

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections. English

Author:

Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001.

ISBN:

9781400068906

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

xix, 166 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:

Poemtrees. For how hard it is -- A colony of allotments -- Smoke will stir -- The intention is sealed -- Nymphenburg -- Epitaph -- Schattwald in Tyrol -- Remembered triptych of a journey from Brussels -- Life is beautiful -- Matins for G. -- Winter poem -- Lines for an album -- Bleston : a Mancunian cantical. Fête nocturne ; Consensus omnium ; The sound of music ; Lingua mortua ; Perdu dans ces filaments -- Didsbury -- Giulietta's birthday -- Time signal at twelve -- Children's song.

School Latin. Votive tablet -- Legacy -- Sarassani -- Day's residue -- Border crosser -- Lay of ill luck -- Memorandum of the divan -- Il ritorno d'Ulisse -- For a Northern reader -- Florean exercise -- Scythian journey -- Saumur, selon Valéry -- L'instruction du roy -- Festifal -- Pneumatological prose -- Comic opera -- Timetable -- Unexplored -- Elizabethan -- Baroque Psalter.

Across the land and the water. Cold draught -- Near Crailsheim -- Poor Summer in Franconia -- Solnhofen -- Leaving Bavaria -- Something in my ear -- Panacea -- Mithraic -- Memo -- Barometer reading -- K.'s emigration -- Through Holland in the dark -- Abandoned -- Mölkerbastei -- A galley lies off Helsingborg -- Holkham gap -- Norfolk -- Crossing the water -- Natural history -- Ballad -- Obscure passage -- Poetry for an album -- Eerie effects of the Hell Valley wind on my nerves -- Unidentified flying objects -- The sky at night -- A peaceable kingdom -- Trigonometry of the spheres -- Day return -- New Jersey journey.

The year before last. The year before last -- A waltz dream -- Donderdag -- The secrets -- On 9 June 1904 -- Ninety years later -- In Bamberg -- Marienbad elegy -- At the edge -- And always -- How silvery -- Somewhere -- In the sleepless -- Room 645 -- My ICE rail-planner -- One Sunday in Autumn 94 -- Calm November weather -- Unchanged for years -- In the Summer of 1836 -- In Alfermée -- On the eve of -- In the paradise landscape -- Appendix : I remember ; October heat wave.

Summary:

A collection of nearly one hundred poems are centered around the poet's signature themes, including nature, history, wandering, and memory.

Personal Subject:

Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001-Translations into English.

Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001

Subject(s):

German poetry -- 20th century -- Translations into English.

Genre:

Added Author:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	831.914 Sebald 2012	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. He has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England since 1970. He became a professor of European literature in 1987. From 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He was born in Wertach in Allgau, Germany in 1944.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Sebald (1944-2011) was tipped for the Nobel Prize but died in a car crash. These 90 poems mostly in short, unpunctuated lines are densely packed with learned literary and historical allusions. He writes about Bruegel, Rembrandt, and Edward Hicks; Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin; Goethe, Kleist, and Kafka. A dispassionate observer, he sees limbs benumbed / in the quicksilver of their angst. He evokes vivid concrete images: Chestnuts fall from their husks / in the rain. / I saw them in the morning / glossy on the sand of the patio. His poems have mysterious conclusions and gnomic insights. Feelings are stars which guide us / only when the sky is clear, and Sebald describes the slightly menacing abandoned poultry farms / haunted by millions and millions / of breakfast eggs. Sebald's dominant themes are journeys, borders, and landscapes; the burdens of exile; time, dreams and the loss of cultural memory this ground / is steeped in history / they find corpses / every time they dig. His masterpiece, On 9 June 1904, portrays Chekhov's death in Germany. The corpse was returned to Russia, incongruously transferred / in a green, refrigerated / freight car marked / FOR OYSTERS. Iain Galbraith accompanies his clear and suggestive translations with useful explanatory notes.--Meyers, Jeffrey Copyright 2010 Booklist

Library Journal Review

While Sebald is best known for his novels (e.g., Austerlitz; The Rings of Saturn), he also wrote poetry. This first major collection, published over a decade after his untimely death in a car accident, shows that his poems explore the same themes-memory, for instance-as his novels. The poems included here range from his student work to his final pieces. "Some readers," translator Galbraith points out in his introduction, "may agree with W.G. Sebald that prose was the medium to which his hand was best suited." Certainly, many of these poems read as mere observations and descriptions of places and feel almost like photographs. In some cases, as in the final section ("The Year Before Last"), readers are confronted with a litany of proper nouns that might be better suited to a longer narrative and render some poems difficult. VERDICT The joy of reading these poems can be found in what Galbraith calls the "battle between the intellect and the senses"-what we see, as in Sebald's novels, is complicated by history and memory. Read closely.--Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Chillicothe (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.