Seascape by Heimrad Bäcker and translated by Patrick Greaney

This is poetry from Austria.

Seascape by Heimrad Bäcker translated by Patrick Greaney is published by Ugly Duckling. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2013.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781933254661E12.

Seascape, by Heimrad Bäcker and translated by Patrick Greaney from German, brings Austrian German-language poetry into English through archival seascape, postwar witness, and Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary pressure on what language can bear after atrocity. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for sea, document, silence, and the frightening clarity that can come from arrangement rather than confession, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Seascape belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings Austrian experimental poetry into direct contact with historical evidence.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.