The Memory of Oblivion

»At night I will write down what I’ve seen / And when my journey ends, my shadow will cross your path again.« Heiner Bastian's »journeys« are made up of lyrical images in a dialogue between reality and imagination. His poems take us to the sites of Greek mythology, of literature, and to the realms of Modernist and post-war art: encounters with motifs by Edvard Munch, Picasso, Edward Hopper, Beuys, Cy Twombly, Francis Bacon and Anselm Kiefer. Heiner Bastian's poetry is also inhabited by Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, his reading of Homer and Milton, Ezra Pound and Cavafy. Bastian's poetry is an unwavering interrogation of the self and a passionate defence of the indeterminate, an echo chamber in which the ‘I’ encounters its strange, unreal reflection.