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Pitch & Glint

Poems
Suhrkamp | Insel
Rights sold to:

English world rights (And Other Stories)


Pitch & Glint / pech & blende
Poems

Reminiscent of the sound of Paul Celan and Dylan Thomas, Seiler evokes an East German community left ecologically and emotionally devastated in the Soviet era

An epoch-defining work

For readers of Maria Stepanova, Paul Celan, Charles Simic, Adam Zagajewski and Dylan Thomas

English edition by And Other Stories: 2023 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

»On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the...
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»On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents’ suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, ›You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.‹« (book description from the English edition by And Other Stories)
»These poems create an inimitable sound world where everything is muted as if beneath a blanket of snow, whispering, sizzling, crackling.« Philip Terry, The Guardian

»Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.« Michael Hofmann

»Pitch & Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.« Michael Krüger

»Epoch-making.« Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.« Ursula Krechel, Der Tagesspiegel

»Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.« Helmut Böttiger, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. [...] Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.« Lothar Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch & Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.« Martin Ahrends, Die Zeit

»Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style, both skittish and 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
»These poems create an inimitable sound world where everything is muted as if beneath a blanket of snow, whispering, sizzling, crackling.« Philip Terry, The Guardian

»Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the...
Read more
2000, 96 pages
Service
Cover (Web)Cover (Print)

DISCOVER

Nachricht
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 to Lutz Seiler.
Nachricht
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 to Lutz Seiler.

DISCOVER

Nachricht
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 to Lutz Seiler.

Persons

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin and in Stockholm. He underwent training as a mason and a carpenter and completed his studies in 1990. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. He was writer-in-residence at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and at the German Academy in Rome. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and most recently the Georg Büchner Prize.

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin and in Stockholm. He underwent training as a mason...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

script for blind giants
Year of Publication: 2021
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2021
After publishing two novels, Lutz Seiler returns to the home port of poems. Back to the voices of childhood, to the Waldstadion, to the »bone park« and to the question of where our...
Rights sold to:

Sweden (Edda)

Star 111
Year of Publication: 2020
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2020

»November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they’ve harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West....

Rights sold to:

UK & Commonwealth (And Other Stories),  USA & Canada (NYRB), Arabic world rights (Kalima), France (Verdier), Italy (Utopia), Netherlands (Meridiaan), Denmark (Batzer), Sweden (Norstedts), Bulgaria (Black Flamingo), Lithuania (Hieronymus), Slovenia (Sodobnost), Greece (Patakis)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (DAV), German Entire Radio Readings (rbb & NDR), German Book Club (Büchergilde Gutenberg)

Kruso
Year of Publication: 2014
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2014
After the accident, Edgar Bendler decides to step out of his own life. He becomes a dishwasher on Hiddensee, that legendary island which is said to lie outside of time and »beyond the...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Scribe), Spanish world rights (Anagrama), Catalan rights (Club Editor), Russia (Text), France (Verdier), Italy (Del Vecchio), Netherlands (Meridiaan / Dutch Media Group), Denmark (Batzer & Co.), Sweden (Norstedts), Norway (Gyldendal Norsk), Japan (Hakusuisha), Poland (Jagiellonian UP), Hungary (Europa), Bulgaria (Atlantis), Romania (RAO), Lithuania (Kitos Knygos), Slovenia (Sodobnost), Turkey (Bence), Greece (Patakis), Macedonia (Goten), Armenia (Antares)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Chinese simplex rights (Horizon), Serbia (Laguna)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Entire Radio Reading (NDR), German Book Club (Büchergilde Gutenberg + Club Bertelsmann)

in field latin
Year of Publication: 2010
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2010
in field latin or in other words: to exist in a field of language, and at the same time explore a landscape’s legends, how they come to one’s ears, in walks, in whispers, in silence....
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Italy (selection, Del Vecchio), Sweden (selection, Faethon)

The Time-Balance
Year of Publication: 2009
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2009
Whether in the story of a play-acted shooting or in the everyday drama of a real-life separation – all the texts in The Time-Balance are about decisive turning-points, about the...
Rights sold to:

Catalan Rights (selection, Club Editor), Arabic world rights (Al'Asreya), France (Verdier), Italy (Del Vecchio Editore)

Turksib
Year of Publication: 2008
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2008
Lutz Seiler first came to be known thanks to his two poetry collections, pech & blende (2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht (2003). For the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize in 2007 he offered up his first short story, Turksib, and was subsequently declared the winner.

  Ilma Rakusa describes the text’s allure: »With poetic-grotesque...
In Case of Loss
Year of Publication: 2004
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2004

»In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler’s non-fiction from last twenty-five years, revealing his essays to be different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry....

Rights sold to:

English world rights (And Other Stories), Italy (selection, Del Vecchio)

forty kilometres of night
Year of Publication: 2003
Lutz SeilerYear of Publication: 2003

Lutz Seiler‘s poems, created between 2000 and 2003, undertake a journey through forty kilometres of night, they lead out of the native landscape, destroyed by uranium mining, depicted in pech...

Rights sold to:

English world rights (And Other Stories)


DISCOVER

News
On June 8, 2023, Lutz Seiler celebrates his 60th birthday.
News
Since 1995, the City of Augsburg has been awarding the Bertolt-Brecht-Preis to writers who critically examine the present in their literary works.
News
The Konrad Adenauer Foundation awards its prize for literature since 1993 to authors who let freedom speak.