Poetry,
Edition Suhrkamp
»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.
‘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.’
‘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.’