Hydra's Heads

Annie Rutherford's translation of Nora Gomringer's poetry/prose/performance work is a Very Good Thing for English-language audiences. This work is determinedly offkilter, revelling in body discomfort, twisting to peer at lovers and history with a microscopic, often sardonic, gaze. There is a gritted effort to dissect the tongue, in more ways than one, and a hauling of national history and complicity into the present tense. She is not interested in comforting the reader and yet, for all that, there is unsentimental tenderness here, a sardonic-but-never-cynical, deeply felt joy. Rachel McCrum; Beautifully translated into the sort of English that feels utterly natural and rhythmically complete while managing to preserve the mouthfeel of Nora's inventive, electrifying German, Hydra's Heads delights with constructions such as `waterfeet' and `chimneying', `Youyouyours' and `Imemine'. In little poems and long poems, words are breathed into life so they become more than tool or musical instrument but letter flesh that pulses up and out from the page. The Holocaust hunkers near the heart of the book, not shied away from but acknowledged in simple, felt language as inherited nightmare and reminder of our human weakness. Love also blushes through the pages; sweet exhalations on a mirror or train window, the self dreaming the other in a moment which cannot be caught but is, and is. JL Williams