‘If this book were a building, it would surely be a makeshift shack of some kind. A shelter for forgotten objects but also a workshop in which wheels are allowed to turn without always having to touch the ground. The views from the window keep changing. No sooner have you glimpsed old tank roads running past dunes in Fischland by the Baltic, than you’re somehow looking out from a hotel room in Los Angeles, or gazing over a lawn, which at first lies outside a proscribed poet’s house in a remote forest, and is then transported to a cultural centre in Rome. There’s a village too, still in the GDR, where everyone is tired thanks to the Cold War decision to convert it into a vast uranium mine. This is an exceptional and absorbing book, in which Lutz Seiler successfully recovers and also recreates the narrative of our times.’ Patrick Wright ---- 'It is never about reconstructing. Memory does not bring back what was forgotten. Indeed, the person who remembers doesn't even know for sure that what is remembered ever existed. . . Seiler's inimitable style as a storyteller, the wilful waywardness and weight of what he has to say, the intensity (and personal tact) of his engagement with the landscapes of others' poetries and lives all make these essays a lively portrait of the writer surrounded by his library. Seiler sets standards for reflection in art today. At the same time, he gives us a sense of the pagan-sacramental importance of objects in poetry.' Sibylle Cramer, Suddeutsche Zeitung

In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler's non-fiction from last twenty-five years, revealing his essays to be different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler's beautifully anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, ‘the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium.’ Other essays focus on poetry, including his discovery of poetry during his military service and pieces on German poets, including Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel, whose former house, outside Berlin, is now home to Lutz Seiler, after he broke and entered it with Huchel's widow's blessing. Meanwhile, the title essay – a fascinating insight into creative process – describes Huchel's notebook, a kind of dictionary of poetic images organised by mood and location. Providing a perfect welcome in to his work as a whole, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe's most original writers speak with openness and clarity in essays full of insight, humanity and a poet's attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.
Les mer
In Case of Loss reveals Seiler's essays to be different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Beautifully anecdotal and associative, they throw a light on literature and his East German background, including the Soviet-era mining community he grew up in, and are full of insight, humanity and an attention to overlooked objects and lives.
Les mer
Praise for Lutz Seiler's Pitch & Glint‘Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.’ Michael Hofmann‘Pitch & Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.’ Michael Krüger‘Epoch-making.’ Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung‘Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.’ Ursula Krechel, Der Tagesspiegel‘Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.’ Helmut Böttiger, Frankfurter Rundschau‘Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.’ Lothar Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch & Glint *remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.’ Martin Ahrends, *Die ZeitMore Praise for Lutz Seiler's Poetry‘Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style, both skittish & firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it’s more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope. The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls.’ Joshua Weiner, Poetry magazine
Les mer
Evocative non-fiction from the German Book Prize winner, including on rural life, growing up in an East German uranium mining community, and the creative process

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781913505783
Publisert
2023-11-28
Utgiver
Vendor
And Other Stories
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
129 mm
Aldersnivå
00, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
192

Forfatter

Biographical note

Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. After an apprenticeship in construction, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Haus. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His prize-winning second novel Star 111, his volume of non-fiction In Case of Loss, and the poetry collection Pitch and Glint, his important first major poetry collection, are published simultaneously in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in the journals The White Review, Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review.