Durs Grünbein Book order

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.

The collection features essays that span two decades, showcasing Durs Grünbein's profound insights into the human experience. It includes memoiristic pieces that reveal his journey as a poet amid a backdrop of political turmoil and totalitarianism, as well as explorations of the interplay between art, science, and literature. The essays delve into existential and ethical themes relevant to contemporary society, while also reflecting on the significance of classical antiquity. This work offers a comprehensive look at Grünbein's philosophical and aesthetic inquiries.

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein. In 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? In 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."

"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 'Florence 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 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"-- Provided by publisher

In this new collection of poems—his most philosophically probing and poetically revealing to date—Durs Grünbein takes us on a spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul and its manifold embodiments across the ages. Addressing us in his own voice as well as through the prisms of Seneca, Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Malebranche, Vermeer, and others, Grünbein subtly and lovingly traces the paradoxes of creatureliness—its joys and sufferings, its resilience and fragility—to remind us of the “mortal diamond from the hands of nature” that is life.

Published in conjunction with the Documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, the Documenta notebook series 100 Notes,100 Thoughts ranges from archival ephemera to conversations and commissioned essays. These notebooks express director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's curatorial vision for Documenta 13.

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.

This landmark collection of essays by one of the world's greatest living authors makes Durs Grünbein's wide-ranging and multifaceted prose available in English for the first time, and is a welcome complement to Ashes for Breakfast, his first book-length collection of poetry in English. Covering two decades, The Bars of Atlantis unfurls the entire breadth and depth of Grünbein's essayistic genius. Memoiristic and autobiographical pieces that introduce Grünbein, the man and the author, and tell the story of the making of a poet and thinker toward the end of a century marked by global political strife, unprecedented human suffering, long decades of totalitarian rule, and, in its final quarter, the dawn of a new, post–Cold War world order; essays that focus on Grünbein's major philosophical and aesthetic concerns, such as the intersection of art and science, literature and biology; extended reflections on the existential, cultural, political, and ethical import of the poet's craft in the contemporary world; and, finally, explorations of the meaning of classical antiquity for the present—all contribute to making.