Search results for ""Author Iain Galbraith""

In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people’s actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith’s comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.

Read more less

In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people’s actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith’s comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.

Read more less

A profound novel detailing the brutal legacy of Nazism on four generations of a family in Germany. Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women—seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna’s daughter Anna—are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutes—the “wild expulsions” of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna? Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimat—homeland—is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Anna’s son. A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgl’s unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.

Read more less

A profound novel detailing the brutal legacy of Nazism on four generations of a family in Germany. Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women—seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna’s daughter Anna—are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutes—the “wild expulsions” of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna? Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimat—homeland—is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Anna’s son. A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgl’s unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.

Read more less

Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation. In the words of her translator: “Esther Dischereit’s poetry offers a visceral pathography of post-war continuities, spectres, amnesia and trauma. Her work builds on the poet’s vulnerability and witness to a previous and ultimately un-sealable dimension – a dimension inhabited in a different way by the poetry of Paul Celan – in which the violations and degradation of the Shoah resonate with harrowing persistence in the detail of contemporary everyday life. At the same time, however, her poems test moments of personal and poetic redress, espousing forms developed in an incessant exploration of speech rhythms and images, celebrating the erotic and quotidian, experimenting with hope, seeking community."

Read more less

‘After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside for a while.’ In River, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder. Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, River is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.

Read more less

A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany. Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany, disdainfully styled “doner murders” by the media, were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, but also that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations. Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved, she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony, myth, and incidents from a history of violence against minorities, Flowers for Otello, in Iain Galbraith’s translation, refuses chaos, instead revealing the chilling, patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer’s humanism to the fore.

Read more less