Description

Translated by Marc Vincenz (White Pine Press, paperback)

Publication Date:August23, 2022

Publisher Marketing:This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merzs fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016.

This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merzs fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016. Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet. This seminal volume brings together selections from Merzs fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).

Reading Merz’ spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato’s cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows. Nin Andrews

Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject as if from fragments. A strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality. Brian Swann

Merz world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. Its no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagisms implied aesthetic of less is more.Lit Pub

An artisan of the understatement, a craftsman of finely-tuned precision. Neue Zuricher Zeitung