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Archipelago Books

Wickerwork

Wickerwork

by Christian Lehnert, translated from the German and with an afterword by Richard Sieburth

$18.00
$18.00
Available as E-Book German Literature
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Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.

Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”

With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770248
Pages: 140
Publication Date:

Praise

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, metaphysical 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

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