Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems

The first English translation of Germany's leading contemporary poet. ...what is the whole surreal jokeshop of terrors compared to the infinitely chance little tricks of a poem. --from "MonoLogical Poem #1" Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grunbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation. Brilliantly edited and translated by the English poet Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast expertly introduces Germany's most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to American readers.

Literature & Fiction

Grünbein, Durs

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grunbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation. Brilliantly edited and translated by the English poet Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast expertly introduces Germany's most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to American readers.

Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and "declaration of love" to the famed "Venice on the Elbe," so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city's destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the "white gold" porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the "myth" of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein's own reflections and an additional canto--an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden's memory. &nbsp;

Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City (The German List)

Seagull Books

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein.\nIn his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn’t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?\nIn the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,” in image and text, Grünbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the “Führer’s streets” and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grünbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “There is something beyond literature that questions all writing.”

For the Dying Calves: Beyond Literature: Oxford Lectures (The German List)

History

Europe

Literary Nonfiction. Philosophy. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell. In three beautifully wrought meditations on the import of René Descartes' legacy from a poet's perspective, Durs Grünbein presents us with a Descartes whom we haven't met before: not the notorious perpetrator of the mind-body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism but the inspired and courageous dreamer, explorer, and fabulist. Reading Descartes against the grain of the widely accepted view of the philosopher as the proponent of a cut-and-dried, disembodied, and, hence, misguided view of humanity, Grunbein discloses the profoundly humane and poetic underpinnings of the legacy of this "modern man par excellence," and, by extension, of modernity as a whole. Uncovering the poetic foundations of Descartes' rationalism and, concomitantly, the poetic lining of the mantle of reason, Durs Grünbein, one of the world's greatest living poets and essayists, shows us that reason is never more alive than when it is most poetic.

Descartes' Devil: Three Meditations

Essays & Correspondence

Upper West Side Philosophers

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Translated from the German by Michael Eskin. This extraordinary book offers a dazzling personal poetics as well as a sustained engagement with the origins of poetry itself. In tracing an arc from the landfills and forests of an East German childhood to the "global air-space of poetry," it takes in a breathtaking poetic itinerary from the Classics to the present day. Emerging from the heart of the European tradition, every page is packed with insight, wit and linguistic surprises, superbly rendered in Michael Eskin's supple English. But more than that: this is a volume with a mission. In reckoning with the possibilities of poetry, it sets out to show us a better way of being in the world: "a guide to thinking and feeling with precision." Written by one of the most exciting and thought-provoking writers of the moment, THE VOCATION OF POETRY is essential reading for anyone interested in modern poetry or in modern life.

The Vocation of Poetry (Subway Line, 4)

Upper West Side Philosophers, Incorporated

"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics features new essays and poetry from some of the world's best writers and artists to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of our current culture and today's politics. This summer issue of Liberties includes: Elliot Ackerman on Veterans Are Not Victims; Durs Grünbein on Fascism and the Writer; R.B. Kitaj's Three Tales; Thomas Chatterton Williams on The Blessings of Assimilation; Anita Shapira on The Fall of Israel's House of Labor; Sally Satel on Woke Medicine; Matthew Stephenson On Corruption's Honey and Poison; Helen Vender on Wallace Stevens; David Haziza on Illusions of Immunity; Paul Berman on the Library of America; Clara Collier's nostalgia for strong women in film; Michael Kimmage on American Inquisitions; Leon Wieseltier (editor) on the high price of Stoicism; Celeste Marcus (managing editor) on a Native American Tragedy; and new poetry from Adam Zagajewski, A.E. Stallings, and Peg Boyers.

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics: Volume I, Issue 4

Ackerman, Elliot

Vendler, Helen

Stephenson, Matthew

BERMAN, PAUL

Collier, Clara

Zagajewski, Adam

Kimmage, Michael

Williams, Thomas Chatterton

Shapira, Anita

Satel, Sally

Stallings, A.E.

Kitaj, R.B.

Haziza, David

Boyers, Peg

Arts & Photography

Liberties Journal

"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" "Liberties is THE place to be. Change starts in the mind." Liberties, a journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and leaders throughout the world; new poetry; and, introduces the next generation of writers and voices to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today's culture and politics. In this issue of Liberties, highlights include: Laura Kipnis on how to think (and how not to think) about gender; Robert Kagan on the values that define American identity; Andrea Marcolongo on the role of the intellectual in contemporary times; Michael Ignatieff on whether freedom of thought is possible in our highly politicized culture; David Greenberg on journalism's change of objectivity over time; Jack Goldsmith on conservatives' use of social media; Bruce Jones on the response to China's threat; Clara Collier on powerful women in old Westerns; Sir Robert Francis Cooper on Burma; Jared Marcel Pollen on Vaclav Havel's complicated legacy; Mitch Abidor's defense of Francois Truffaut; Andrew Butterfield on the creative inspiration from Dante's exile; David Bell on fascism's identity in France; Steven Nadler on Spinoza's ostracism; new literary criticism from Helen Vendler, and, poetry from Charis Vlavianos, Nathaniel Mackey, and Durs Grünbein.

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics: Volume II, Issue 3

Bell, David A.

MacKey, Nathaniel

Kipnis, Laura

Abbot, Dorian

LÉVY, Bernard-Henri

Jones, Bruce D.

Rowland, Ingrid

COOPER, ROBERT

Nadler, Steven M.

Vlavianos, Haris

Greenberg,David

Jensen, Morten Høi

Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City (The Seagull Library of German Literature)

A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Grünbein's work over the past two decades. Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens--a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in--Grünbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages. In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Grünbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Grünbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease. &nbsp;

Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022 (The German List)

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