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.

‘Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style (expertly carried over with cunning intuition by Booth), both skittish and firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. 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.’—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

Read an excerpt in Asymptote.

Read an interview with translator Alexander Booth in which he discusses translating Lutz Seiler, which earned him a PEN Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2012.