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Unexpected Development

Klaus Merz author Marc Vincenz translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:White Pine Press

Published:22nd Mar '18

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Unexpected Development cover

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In these lyrical miniatures, Merz reconnoiters the sustainability of the world and the endurance of language.Merz is keenly attentive to daily life as a revelator of essential truths, and thus uses poetry as a way of returning closer to it; and “to unbecome what was.”  Merz' “nearing” and “distancing” processes take place inside us, through language. By summing up so gently and exactly (but also sometimes drolly or pointedly) the movement of duality, Merz enables us to sense more fully, time and again, what it means to be alive: that “strange exhilaration within,” as he puts it in another of these splendid poems so vividly and resourcefully translated by Marc Vincenz.

“Merz's is a voice unfamiliar to English-language readers, but this collection should remedy that. His language is clipped and terse, dry, precise, sardonic even. A narrative pokes through and light comes in short bursts as Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject, shaping it as if from fragments. It all adds up to a strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality. These poems, expertly Englished by master translator-poet Marc Vincenz, delight, engage and tease the mind.” —Brian Swann "“Reading Klaus Merz’ spare and illuminating poems is like entering Plato’s cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows. As he writes in his poem, “Exchange Rate” “From the bright light/behind the apparition/ the poem recounts.” What is recounted however, is often as disquieting as it is enlightening. His unblinking honesty and lyrical genius offer a kind of dark salvation, or a salvation in the sense Camus might have meant when he wrote: “If one could say just once: ‘this is clear,’ all would be saved.”  Merz is like a diamond cutter—he writes of the inevitable and the ineffable with incisive, shimmering clarity.” —Nin Andrews

ISBN: 9781945680144

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

140 pages