Collected Poems

In Jürgen Becker's literary oeuvre – which includes prose and radio plays – poetry has become dominant by now. Becker has found a poetic way of speaking that makes his poems unmistakable creations; they are exemplary for the precision of perception and the intensity of memory, for a technique of association that fuses concrete places and real events with abstract processes and dark imaginings. The setting of his poems is a landscape of consciousness into which all the experience of real landscape has entered, with places and areas that find themselves on a poetic map, in the sketches of a possible topography. From the very beginning, a narrative impulse runs through Jürgen Becker’s poems and turns many of them into a journal that speaks of the momentary experience as well as of long journeys, of the search for a vanished past. This leads – especially in the longer poems, which have become characteristic for Becker – to discoveries of buried memories, to perceptions of simultaneity, in which the now corresponds directly with the past. »... writing extends the moment and remains on the way to this horizon of origin, time, faces and things, which can never be reached, but nevertheless enters your life in a sequence of words ...«

»Becker does not employ metaphors – which creates clear contouring, sharpness, the conciseness of tilting images in which what is present can turn into the past and the imaginary.« Joachim Sartorius, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Jürgen Becker was born in 1932. His childhood, therefore, was World War II-a disease from which he has been recovering ever since the fighting stopped. His poems do not presume to address the horrors directly, but with great courage he casts sidelong glances at things he remembers or the things that prompt such memories. These are important poems, not just about the war but about any unbearable catastrophe the scars of which last forever.« David R. Slavitt, translator of The Theban Plays of Sophocles (Yale University Press) and La Vita Nova by Dante (Harvard University Press)