Unexpected Development

“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