The Art of Topiary

Poetry

The Art of Topiary

Poems
"In our most violent of centuries: here is the poet who is willing to stop, and stand still, in the intense brief moment of being, and see the largesse in the smallest of astonishments.”—ILLYA KAMINSKY
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A dual-language collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.

The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals—acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time—into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations.

Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun. Yet for all Wagner’s wit and sharp poetic detail, The Art of Topiary is written with an intimate earnest: a swarm of gnats take on an urgent mystery as they hum in code around the speaker’s ears, a bird atop a rhino’s leathery back becomes a fragile porcelain cup, and the antlers of an elk reach for the air like a champion for a trophy.

Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.

ISBN:
9781571314963
Publish Date: 
10/10/2017
Pages: 
144
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.4 in
Weight: 
7.2 oz
Author

Jan Wagner is a German poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of The Art of Topiary, translated in collaboration with David Keplinger. The editor of two influential anthologies of German language poetry, Wagner is also the German translator of several British and American poets, including James Tate, Matthew Sweeney, and Charles Simic. In 2017, he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. He lives in Berlin.

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