Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. 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. Martyn Crucefix has published six full collections of poetry. His translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, while These Numbered Days, translations of poems by Peter Huchel, won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His new collection Between A Drowning Man was published in 2023.<p>‘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, <em>Süddeutsche Zeitung</em></p>
<p>‘Served by a trio of stellar translators, And Other Stories has done a great service bringing these three works into English. They will allow a new audience to enter Lutz Seiler’s haunted world and admire his singular voice in its different refractions.’ Karen Leeder, <em>Times Literary Supplement</em></p>
<p>‘We see the “fascination of the factual”, but also the struggle to find a voice and shape the urgent material of reality. Many of the essays turn on origins and how to narrate history, venturing back to childhood, conscription, early poems, places of personal significance and some of the author’s great literary predecessors and mentors, including Peter Huchel, Jürgen Becker and Ernst Meister.’ Karen Leeder, <em>Times Literary Supplement</em></p>
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.
‘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, Süddeutsche Zeitung
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.
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 Zeit
More 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