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Distributed for Seagull Books

in field latin

Distributed for Seagull Books

in field latin

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, 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 twenty-first century.

96 pages | 5 x 8 1/2 | © 2016

The Seagull Library of German Literature

Poetry


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Reviews

“Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style (expertly carried over with cunning intuition by Booth), both skittish & firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it’s more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope. The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls.”

Joshua Weiner, Poetry Magazine

“A careful arrangement of seven sections, each including between one and eleven poems, allows Seiler’s poetry to speak for its richness, assertions visible like reflected, projected light through a prism. At times dense, and at other times utterly accessible and distilled, in field latin is as much about playfulness in themes and core ideas as it is about challenge and a personalized representation of the self.”

Queen Mobs Teahouse

Table of Contents

departure
there were parts of places, places
1. the new empire
2. there were parts of places, places
3. the rough tone
4. when you have the benefit of hindsight
5. sentry duty
6. in the evening
7. after the game
8. leftopenness
9. before the demolition

hand-wonder & diary
everything about me
harvest fest
culmitzsch
old garage questions
aranka, the name alone
the old company
suddenly auntie lanny
hand-wonder & diary

into the mark
into the mark
why, anteus, this place
the stay
october evening at the inflamed
do you see the red brick moon
chaussee
the trains 
the glow of home
autumn
in the pipes

along i went, i froze
in field latin
beware
public news service
sixth january
along i went, i froze
what we see
wasn’t that the way? indeed
early animal
what i possessed

as far as africa
bodmers vale
the photographer & his motif
darss poem
the river elbe near wilsnack
paternity
anecdote from the last war
to the sky
mylius street
exit sangerhausen—as if

footonauts
the footonauts

inventory
inventory
the very fast affection
may the south save us
end
whoever walks behind
come on mum make
night drive 
hypnotized modern
as if
the scent of poems
the end will come in the stairwell 

Notes
Translator’s Acknowledgements 

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