Equidistance

»Now they were all mere playthings in the grasping arms of a state order such as had never existed before. An order that could only be destroyed from the outside by lightning and...

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, poet Durs Grünbein deals with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since the moment he started to perceive his own position...

The title of a book of poetry could not be any more provocative, and still the poet allows no room for doubt: »In general, that which we call reality is greatly overestimated.«...

Spark Plugs is a collection of 83 poems in diverse forms consisting of dream fragments, snippets of speech, prose poems, broken sonnets, and sequences that read like accident reports....

What is going on? The Americans are abandoning the moon, leaving the earth’s seemingly dead companion to stragglers. Time to recapitulate: On a Sunday afternoon in Berlin, on the airfield of the disused Tempelhof Airport, poet Durs Grünbein makes a momentuous observation.

Durs Grünbein’s volumes of poetry are known for grasping their subjetcs in larger and larger circles, in their concentric sprawl they seem made for this age of globalisation. His new collection of poetry follows the outline of an exhibition. Works from the last five to eight years are presented in seven sections.

There are images of a journey, excursions into the unknown routine,...

Proceeding on the observation that poetics that create norms and set benchmarks no longer existed, Grünbein traces his poetic career as a »sketch of a personal psychopoetics«.

This...

The term »metaphor« derives from the Greek metà phérein (»to carry elsewhere«), which, in Antiquity, usually meant »by ship«, so that sea travel itself soon became a metaphor for poetry....

Durs Grünbein visited Japan four times, in pursuit of a long elective affinity for the East that is also reflected in his works. During all of the four journeys he kept a travel journal in the...

This volume contains 25 essays. It provides a chronological rip cut of Durs Grünbein‘s rich essay writing over the course of more than 15 years – from the early, much-quoted texts...

The Misanthrope on Capri (a reference to emperor Tiberius) gathers Durs Grünbein’s »histories«, printed in various publications and in his own volumes of poetry – poems that mainly deal...

In the nine essays and speeches collected in this volume, Durs Grünbein circles the prerequisites, conditions and consequences of writing.

»The intimate tries to assert itself through writing,« he says, »paradoxically by exposing itself publicly. But it soon becomes clear that the public is nothing by a particularly impervious protective layer.« Grünbein lets the reader partake in...

»Stop, wanderer, and read!«, called out the tombstones to the passers-by two thousand years ago. Inscriptions spoke of the pleasures of the deceased, of profession and merit, character...

Durs Grünbein notes his experience of reality in crass and direct images and propels his poems forward by the »silent turmoil« of an elegiac expressionism.

In these poems, a...