Wickerwork

“In Lehnert’s poems, the shroud of the mystic is wedded to the intransigent eye of the rationalist. His work expresses a synergistic relation between man and nature … [Wickerwork’s] thrilling effect is an immersion in a network of images which, far from recognizable, enmesh us in unfamiliarity. We do not “decipher,” though we are made to draw nearer. Here are mosses, plankton, whales, fungi, irreducibly themselves, irreducibly different.”
—Adam Krasnoff, Full Stop

“Lehnert’s imagination is precise, patient, yearning. It goes in search of everyday epiphanies in minute natural “happenings”: seeds splitting open, hoarfrost transmuting a twig to a feather. But it also documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound.” —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

“Timeless, ecstatic, original: Richard Sieburth creates an intricate music for Christian Lehnert’s crystalline poems. Lehnert sees nature—amoebas, bats, lichen, whales—in a mystic glow reflected from Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and the Zohar. To read these poems is to put a finger on the pulse of life, to feel algae as a membrane, ‘its yesterdays and tomorrows / sheathed in slime,’ and amethyst as ‘sediment in shock.’ An incandescent experience.” — Rosanna Warren

“Richard Sieburth stands among the truly masterful English translators of our time. His perfect dictional pitch and musical dexterity, combined with staggering erudition, ring out not only from every line he translates, but in his choice of what to render and his framing of it all with prose that lights the way there and back. Sieburth’s latest translational revelation comes in the form of Christian Lehnert’s Wickerwork, the supple, metaphysicianal weave of which seems to emerge from several lifetimes of looking and reflection: ‘There the growth of things is never in doubt. // The linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.’” — Peter Cole

“Emily Dickinson reminds us that ‘microscopes are prudent in an emergency.’ These visionary miniatures understand the essential part for the whole. With sheer compression and economy of expression, Lehnert gives us, through the material world, miraculously, the vast mystery of being on earth. Once again, Richard Sieburth’s work is astonishing and musical. As one says, good things come in small packages. It couldn’t be truer for this book.” — Peter Gizzi

“Sieburth’s translations are remarkable—his ability to render rhyme and meter being the supreme challenge, and his true triumph.” — Mark Wunderlich

Christian Lehnert was born in Dresden in 1969. Since 1995 he has published poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, and in literary journals, including German Academy of Arts’ Sinn und Form. In 2010, Lehnert’s libretto for Hans Werner Henze’s opera Phaedra was performed at the Barbican. Lehnert’s work has been awarded several prizes including the Eichendorff Prize in 2016, and the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2018. He is the head of the Liturgical Studies department at the University of Leipzig.

Richard Sieburth is a translator from French and German, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained recognition for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Sieburth is the editor of multiple volumes of Ezra Pound’s writings and translations.

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