[close] Edward Snow has done the poetry-reading world a tremendous service in translating and collecting these previously obscure pieces of Rainer Maria Rilke's. The poems were written late in Rilke's career, and continue his lifelong concerns with the deepest and subtlest questions of being. Beautiful and lyrical writing fills these pages, as in this untitled poem, written in Paris in March, 1913: "We don't know what we spend: / all that's named is past and each being / invents itself at the last second / and will hear nothing ..." [close]