Die windvanger

In nine sections, the poet looks back over his own work and doubts that poetry is worth anything at all. New York after the attacks of September 2001, where he teaches, opens the collection, in dialogue with Villon and Ginsberg. Poems to his father admit how much the son owes him and how alike they have grown, loud-mouthed yet defenceless; others take the reader into the workshop where a poem is put together. A birthday poem turns on the failure of every creed. Love poems call to a distant beloved from Hanoi, some in two languages, while Paris, Gorée, the Netherlands and a mountain pass in the Little Karoo give the poems their places, among echoes of Rimbaud, Neruda and Sheila Cussons, and of silence.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

178 pages in the original

First published

2007 by Human & Rousseau

ISBN

9780798147507 (original)