Description: Lutz Seiler grew up in the former East Germany and has lived most of his life outside Berlin. His poems, not surprisingly, are works of the border, the in-between, and the provincial, marked by whispers, weather, time's relentless passing, the dead and their ghosts. It is a contemporary poetry of landscape, fully aware of its literary and non-literary forebears, a walker's view of the place Seiler lives, anchored by close, unhurried attention to particulars. With his precise, memorable language--rendered here in compelling English--Seiler has pulled off a difficult feat: recontextualizing and radically personalizing the long tradition of German nature writing for the twenty-first century.
Brief description: Lutz Seiler was born in 1963 in Gera, a town in eastern Thuringia. He has published one novel and several volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays.
Review Quotes: "Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style (expertly carried over with cunning intuition by Booth), both skittish & firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it's more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope. The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls."-- "Joshua Weiner, Poetry Magazine"