Poetry conquers the bestseller lists as never before. In readers’ favor, poetry lags far behind novels and stories. Yet it is the supreme discipline among all literary genres. It is particularly appealing to authors with a talent for language and a love of language. Franconia is also home to outstanding lyricists who are asserting their place in the concert of poetic voices. Dirk Kruse presents three new volumes of poetry: by Nora Gomringer from Upper Franconia, Jehuda Amichai from Lower Franconia and Joachim Sartorius from Middle Franconia.
Status: 17.03.2021 | Archive
The Bamberg-based poet Nora Gomringer is one of Germany’s most popular and trenchant poets. Although she is only 40 years old, she has won numerous prizes for her work. Nora Gomringer’s latest volume of poetry is also her most personal. Because it answers the Gretchenfrage, how it holds the author with religion. "God’s provider" is the title of the volume, which is intended as an offer to readers.
"It is in modesty an offer to show how my relationship to faith and piety is perhaps also, how it is ordered and how I feel as a believer in the here and now and where the faith helps me. With love, for example, in all its forms and losses, faith has been a very safe haven for me."
Love poems are included, as well as funeral poems. This-worldly and other-worldly. Poems to God and about religious customs. Sometimes serious, but more often with a twinkle in his eye.
Jesus
comes
We tidy up,
sweep under the carpet,
put us straight
with cut hair,
put on a dress,
also the honest guys
say thank you and please.
Jesus who looks.
He doesn’t know us like that.
Asks if he is mistaken in the door ..
And I say:
You do
the one evening
may be polite for a change.
Info and rating
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Nora Gomringer: Gottesanbieterin, Berlin 2020, Voland& Quist Verlag, 96 pages + audio CD, 20,00 Euro, ISBN 978-3-86391-250-5
"God provider" is a confession of faith by Nora Gomringer of the unobtrusive, but all the more effective kind. We are not proselytized, but receive refined offers of thought. This shiny silver, reflective book of poems holds a mirror up to us not only visually.
Joachim Sartorius: "Where to go with the eyes"
Joachim Sartorius: "Where to go with your eyes"
His 75. The Furth-born lyricist, essayist, editor and translator Joachim Sartorius is celebrating his birthday this week. The former diplomat and festival director is the most well-traveled of the German poets. After a five year break he has now published a new poetry collection. The poems are mostly set on the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily, where Sartorius has a second home.
WAKING UP IN ORTIGIA
The night washes the sea.
In the morning the water is new.
On the retina becomes light
paid with spray.
I brush salt off the table.
I kiss the eyes of the lizard.
I cut the bread.
The day becomes immensely bright.
Later the sea takes you
the coins off
and carve into each
the name of a nymph
for the long happiness,
to be alive.
"Where to go with the eyes" is the name of this new poetry collection. For the poet is first and foremost a man of the eyes, one who observes and perceives the depths of reality.
"Where to put the eyes, that has a little to do with the brightness, the great sensuality. Many poems are set in the south of Europe. So it is also about being dazzled. The second is, a lot of what happens today is so terrible that you might not even want to notice it and hide your eyes. And the third point is perhaps that in the course of a long life – and I am quite old now – you grow more eyes rather than less, and you develop very different methods of observation, of perception."