An uncompromising masterpiece that transforms memory and renewal into a wild world of words.
Fleurs—flowers, flower petals—a title that might suggest a gentle world of blooming fields and soft breezes. But in the hands of Friederike Mayröcker, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this is a book of a very different kind. It is a wild, vivid journey into a rich, elemental landscape.
If you follow Mayröcker’s path, you find not a comfortable meadow but steep, stony ground—a place where her inimitable voice rings out in all its power and purity. Unsentimental and crystal clear, Mayröcker’s writing is driven by a single purpose: to create images of remarkable vividness in a language as free, bold, and fresh as if it were newly invented.
The final installment of Mayröcker’s trilogy, following études and cahier, fleurs is a book of memory and renewal, protest and revelation—a testimony to the enduring magic of writing itself.
Friederike Mayröcker (born 20 December 1924 in Vienna) is an Austrian poet. From 1946 to 1969 Mayröcker was an English teacher at several public schools in Vienna. In 1969 she took a release from working as a teacher and in 1977 she retired early.
She started writing as a 15-year-old. In 1946, she meet Otto Basil who published some of her first works in his avant-garde journal Plan. Mayröcker's poems were published a few years later by renowned literary critic Hans Weigel. She was eventually introduced to the Wiener Gruppe, a group of mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian authors.
Friederike Mayröcker is recognized as one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets. She also had success with her prose and radio plays. Four of them she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, with whom she lived together from 1954 until his death in 2000.
Her prose is often described as autofictional, since Mayröcker uses quotes of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries in her work.
Mayröcker describes her working process as follows: "I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language."
A German biographical movie documenting Mayröcker's life and work was released in 2008