For Years Now

by W.G. Sebald, Tess Jaray (Illustrator)

This work is a collaboration between two artists. It contains 23 short poems by W.G. Sebald, each of them paired with a related image by Tess Jaray. The oblique nature of his poems complements the tension and weightlessness of her works.

'A potent, haunting marriage of poetry and art'
Richard Cork The Times

'Sebald is a rare and elusive species'
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

'Jaray has an extraordinary power to purify the way we see things'
Patricia Morison, The Daily Telegraph

'This isn't art that is about poetry, it's art that is poetry'
Charles Darwent, Independent on Sunday

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.

At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[M. D. Hudson]

Why is it that masters of prose think they can knock off poems in their spare time? James Joyce did it, John Gardner, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oats (I’d imagine), etc. Poems, they think, are just like novels except a lot shorter and therefore, lots easier, you know.

And so here I am reading and reviewing, at the same time, W. G. Sebald’s very, very slender book of verse called For Years Now. Before you think I am being disrespectful or unfair reading and reviewing a book of poetry simultaneously, let me quote the first poem in its entirety:

It is said

Napoleon was
colourblind
& could not
tell red
from green

Yep, that’s it. There are 23 of these things of about the same length, making this book about 300 words long. Most of the book is taken up with “art.” In this case, the following full two pages consist of graphics, “images” they are called on the title page, all lovingly Xeroxed by Tess Jarary. Green and white rectangles skewed across the page making a sloppy wallpaper of sorts. These wallpapery images correspond to the poem preceding it (green and green in this instance). The next poem:

Please

send me
the brown coat
the one I used
to wear on
my night journeys

What follows is wallpaper consisting of a brown field with tiny white fish eggs.

Apparently

the red spots
on Jupiter are
centuries old
hurricanes

What follows is a solid red page with, you know, red spots. (Squares, actually, but what’s the diff?). And so on.

But tiny dabs of interest can be found by the starved reader. Classical allusions abound (well, they abound in a book that consists of 200 words or so). Both Pliny and Scipio are mentioned. The confessional poets have had an obvious influence:

The smell

of my writing paper
puts me in mind
of the woodshavings (sic)
in my grandfather’s
coffin

Maybe “woodshavings” is one word in England. I was too lazy to look it up. Beyond spelling, this poem caused me to speculate on the choices poets who eschew all punctuation must make when it comes to possessives. I mean really, isn’t the apostrophe in “grandfather’s” an intrusion, an impurity, a sign of weakness? I’ll have to drop W. S. Merwin an email on that. i mean W S Merwin

The best poem is this one, another confessional:

I recall now

there were pictures
of decapitations
in my house
master’s room

Dark (almost blood) red page with tiny white squares (skulls?) opposite this one. Remind me not to send my kids to boarding school in Switzerland.

Sorry to say, I own this book. And I paid £6.50 for it (that was $13.00 ‘mericun during my visit to London in ’07). Why did I buy this thing? Because I love W. G. Sebald that much! Really, I am a huge fan and I have read all his (prose) books (Austerlitz twice). But this book of poems is ridiculous. The least he could have done was call it, rather than a book of poems, a book of captions. Then it could be shelved in the art section where the graphic nonsense dwells.

Whatever it is, it’s a waste of paper (it is beautifully printed, despite being a paperback). Stuff like this might’ve been cool in 1971, but it is an exercise in desolate art-mongering and pretension now. Run away

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

WG Sebald is of course famous for two things which have characterised the word Sebaldian: his wonderfully digressive writing, with long sentences spooling over the page, tumbling from one idea to another and then somehow working back to the original thread; his slightly out of focus but evocative black and white photographs.

It is hard therefore to think of a less Sebaldian book than this one produced very shortly after his untimely death in 2001: consisting of a seemingly randomly ordered collection of some of Sebald’s poems (with a typical length of around 10 words and rather lacking in any insight) and crisp two colour artistic illustrations (some of which rather too obviously match the poem).

A typical sample:

The poem: “Apparently the red spots on Jupiter are centuries old hurricanes”
Illustration: A red page with white spots

I think it is fair to say that “The Spots of Jupiter” is not really a worth successor to the “Rings of Saturn”.

The only poem I did appreciate (simply as I saw a link to the topic of deforestation which lies at the heart of “The Rings of Saturn”) was “In Scipio's days, one could walk
all the way through the north of Africa in the shade”.

[Catherine Corman]

In Scipio's days

one could walk
all the way
through the north
of Africa in
the shade

-Sebald, For Years Now

[Phillip Barron]

Quirky

[Lysergius]

Tiny little poems set among Tess Jaray's illustrations. Wonderful.

[Alexandru Madian]

It is said

Napoleon was
colourblind
& could not
tell red
from green
(p. 9)

Please

send me
the brown coat
the one I used
to wear on
my night journeys
(p. 12)

Apparently

the red spots
on Jupiter are
centuries old
hurricanes
(p. 18)

My love

I am sending you
this picturesque
view of the river
Rhine as I will
be leaving today
by the six o’
clock steamer
(p. 21)

In Scipio’s days

one could walk
all the way
through the north
of Africa in
the shade
(p. 27)

Last night

a Polish
mechanic
came & for
a thousand
florins made
me a new
perfectly
functioning
head
(p. 30)

I saw

this house
on a hill
in the night
& through
the windows
brightly
the flames
(p. 39)

The smell

of my writing paper
puts me in mind
of the woodshavings
in my grandfather’s
coffin
(p. 42)

Elephants

Pliny says
know the
difference
between
right &

wrong & they
worship the
stars & pray
to the sun
& the moon
(p. 45)

Feelings

my friend
wrote Schumann
are stars
which guide us
only under
a dark sky
(p. 48)

Awful

the thought of
what happened
to all our
cast-off
clothes
(p. 51)

Do you still

remember that
grey afternoon
in the month
of March when
we walked through
the deserted park
on Peacocks’ Island
(p. 54)

I recall now

there were pictures
of decapitations
in my house
master’s room
(p. 60)

Rhine Valley

at dusk
northward
we go into
the bays
of darkness
(p. 69)

When she looked

into his room
my mother said
he lay on his
bed his eyes
green with fear
(p. 72)

For years now

I’ve had this
whistling
sound in
my ears
(p. 75)

[jesse]

incredibly dull set of poems, with illustrations so abstract it's unclear if they even relate to the prose.

[Ruth Brumby]

I liked the connection with the visual art. The very simple and brief words have power in that context.