Seasonal Time Change

This new volume of Michael Krüger’s poetical-lyrical explorations of nature, after Just Before the Storm (2003), Under the Open Sky (2007) and Clarity (2010), is published just in time for the author’s seventieth birthday. They are poems that focus on our living conditions with a mixure of amazement and reflection – one hundred attempts at summarising centrifugal events without heroics, as succinctly as possible, in order to catch an image of the world, be it ever so fleeting.

»Seasonal Time Change [...] presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger’s poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet’s world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature’s unsentimental image.« Rain Taxi

»Michael Krüger’s poems do not speak of love but once can love their inconsolable beauty, their noblesse and their earnestness, and they deserve it.« Hans-Herbert Räkel, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Michael Krüger’s new poems form a great elegy on the disappearing visibility of the world that draws on a great tradition of nature poetry, intermittently but not with resignation, but that, at the same time, constitutes a very personal lament about a wasted life. […] the poet at the height of his art.« Friedmar Apel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»The great strength of these poems lies in the fact that they are always critical of contemporary frgetfulness, always vigilant towards the listless eye, the indifferent ear.« Jürgen Brocan, Fixpoetry