Across The Land And The Water: Selected Poems 1964 2001

Description

"Across the Land and the Water" brings together poems published during W.G. Sebald's life, with an additional selection of those which were found in his literary archives in Marbach and never published while he was alive. Arranged chronologically, from work published during his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he produced during the 1980s, the poems touch on the themes which were closest to Sebald - nature and history; forgetting and remembering; borders, journeys and landscapes. The poems in "Across the Land and the Water" express in short, lyrical form the same distinctive insight and sensitivity that shaped W.G. Sebald's great works of prose fiction. "Even in a seemingly simple six-line poem, the sudden weight of historical events can be felt." ("Economist"). "A significant addition to Sebald's main achievement - full of things that are beautiful and fascinating." (Andrew Motion, "Guardian"). "The quintessential European writer, erudite, worldly and aware of the inescapable legacies of war ...Sebald readers can hear the master's voice again." (Gerald Dawe, "Irish Times"). W.G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and settled permanently in England in 1970, where he was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia until his death in 2001. He is the author of four works of fiction: "The Emigrants", which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and the Joseph Breitbach Prize; "The Rings of Saturn; Vertigo; and Austerlitz", which was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Alongside this stand books of poetry "For Years Now", "After Nature", "Unrecounted", and "Across the Land and the Water", and the non-fiction books "On the Natural History of Destruction and Campo Santo".

Reviews

Praise for W. G. Sebald

"Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W. G. Sebald."--Susan Sontag

"Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno's dictum that after it, there can be no art."--Richard Eder, "The New York Times Book Review"

"Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away."--Anthony Lane, "The New Yorker"

"The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak."--Charles Simic, "The New York Review of Books"