Lutz Seiler: in field latin

translated by Alexander Booth

Lutz Seiler grew up in the former East Germany and has lived most of his life outside Berlin. His poems, not surprisingly, are works of the border, the in-between and the provincial, marked by whispers, weather, time’s relentless passing, the dead and their ghosts. It is a contemporary poetry of landscape, fully aware of its literary and non-literary forebears, a walker’s view of the place Seiler lives in, anchored by close, unhurried attention to particulars. With his precise, memorable language – rendered here in compelling English – Seiler has pulled off a difficult feat: recontextualizing and radically personalizing the long tradition of German nature writing for the the twenty-first century.

German original published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, under the title im felderlatein in 2010.