Not Orpheus: Selected Poems

by Ernst Meister, Richard Dove (Translator)

This work is an anthology of the poems of Ernst Meister, described by Walter Jens as the tenderest epic poet imaginable. An inveterate outsider, from the start he was out of step, publishing his first book of what a reviewer called Kandinsky poetry months before the Nazis seized power. He might have been branded a degenerate poet with fatal consequences. After World War II, Meister re-emerged writing runic verse in the teeth of a coloquial, Brechtian orthoxoy which emphasized relevance and political definition.

182 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Ernst Meister was a German poet and writer.

Meister's poetry falls within a dark abstract landscape of existentialism, with tortured themes influenced by his experiences during World War II. In his 1976 collection of poems, Im Zeitspalt (In Time's Rift), Meister frankly addresses mortality and the nothingness of our existence as both mind and body decay into death. His poetry is noted for is spare brevity and difficult syntax and has been compared to the work of Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920 - 1970), Meister's contemporary in German letters. However, despite writing 16 collections of verse, Meister was not involved with the dominant literary and cultural elite and his works were relatively unknown during his lifetime.
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