Description
Book SynopsisIn these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity.
Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.
Trade ReviewPoetry translation is such tricky and unappreciated work—“translation is impossible,” Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick declare in their introduction to a volume of Ernst Meister's work in which they've performed that exact miracle. —Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry Review
Like his subject matter, Meister’s writing is ominous, intangible, and inescapable. —Publishers Weekly
Meister compacts a meditation on the nature of space, nothingness and our interaction with the two in the work’s sparse, dense lines. —Lindsay Choi, The Daily Californian
