I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other

by Ulrike Almut Sandig, Karen Leeder (Translator)

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable.

Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence in these poems from Ulrike Almut Sandig. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word “Grimm”: rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by passionate, expansive empathy—and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.
 

Genres: Poetry, German Literature

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2016

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ulrike Almut Sandig is a poet for whom performance and collaboration—with other poets, musicians and filmmakers—is very important. That sensibility colours her very distinctive poetry. This collection with its wonderfully eccentric title (corresponding to sections of the text but also echoed, sowing connections, draws on traditional folktale imagery to comment on war, the fate of migrants and rising Right Wing sentiments. Included is the sequence "Grimm" that calls upon some of the darker and lesser known tales, to consider present horrors. An expanded review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2020/06/27/da...