Wickerwork

by Christian Lehnert, Richard Sieburth (translator)

Vivifying poetry of nature and the spirit — explore a mystical world of hawkmoths and elvers, skylarks and salamanders, with the shimmering grace of Gary Snyder

"Lehnert's imagination is precise, patient, yearning... [it] documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.

Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”

With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short poems focused mainly on the natural world was lovely to read on a gorgeous spring day.

[Darion · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A delightful collection of short poems, primarily about nature and the natural world, really wonderfully translated by Richard Sieburth. The layout with the English and original German mirroring each other on the page is a nice touch that helped me slow down and appreciate the translation work even more. Read this when you feel like you need to listen to the birds chirping and feel the grass between your toes.

I particularly enjoyed the first section, Opus 8, and my favorite poems, The summer linden (Tilia Platyphyllos) and Viruses.

Excerpt from The summer linden:
There the growth of things is never in doubt /
The linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.

Viruses
Leftover lives / it's only on others they take their chance /
These tiniest of souls / ever restless for foreign lands.

[Jack Bussert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The physical book itself is gorgeous. The spirit behind the poetry’s forms is inspiring. The content of the poems certainly resonates, but the rhyming adds too much saccharine for where I am. Others should definitely give this a shot, but it’s not for me.

[Regan Strehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A name is the herb/imagined by the silent seed"
"Who is it/that smolders/magma-like or meteor-bright?
A rift: she breathes out/all body now/all pore and night"