»Knelt in the straw as in the innermost fears, on the cobble-stones echoed the chaise carting the milk away.«

– From the poem „In the straw“ –
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Poetry,
Edition Suhrkamp

Original edition 1995 as Suhrkamp Paperback, 2nd. edition 2001
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3d. edition, published 03.03.2008
Paperback, Soft-cover brochure
ISBN: 978-3-630-62132-6
OVERVIEW POETRY

gedächtnisschleifen

»memory loops« – the material of memory is collected in loose loops, circling movements. They often come from a long way off – from the post-war years, from childhood. The words are ambiguous; they have been broken open, blemished until they irritatingly and temptingly begin to shimmer and merge to become the main focus of the book: this is farewell, this is the end of love, this is death.

In her volume of poetry, her first book to be published, Ulrike Draesner touches on subjects and a way of working with language that is enormously to influence her later work. Above all, this means the use of modern artificial languages from natural and other sciences. There is a continual search not only for the meanings of the words but also for their ambiguity, for the areas of meanings a word can open up once it has been put in the right context. This volume of poetry allows the reader to understand the poet’s unique literary development.

PRESS COMMENTARIES

‘A world in a daze. No, you cannot finish these poems, they stir up too much, they draw too much into their magnetic field. This is a debut which gives you very high expectations for what is to come.’

Salzburger Nachrichten

‘There is an unusual linguistic energy at work here, equally strong semantically and rhythmically; words are taken apart and put together anew; familiar meanings start sliding away; and something else is unmistakable – something we can, as we could in the past, call a distinctive tone.’

Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)
LINKS