Lutz Seiler was born in the former East Germany in the Langenberg district of Gera, Thuringia. He first had a career as a skilled construction worker as both a bricklayer and carpenter. It was during his service in the National People’s Army that he first took an interest in poetry and literature. Since 1997 he has been the literary director and custodian at the Peter Huchel Museum in Wilhelmshorst. He has won numerous awards for his writing including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for his short story volume Turksib.
in field latin, published by Seagull Books in 2016, is Seiler’s debut volume of poetry translated into English. Divided into seven sections which include between one and eleven poems, this collection gives us an interesting glimpse into life in the former East Germany via lyrics that describe landscapes, personal reflections and ghosts.
The most striking images that Seiler weaves throughout this collection are those of nature; in the first poem, entitled “Departure” he invites us into his bucolic world:
bed against window, the trip
into the wood, ever more softly
shifting gears & sleep: every
dream begins uphill, at the fence
onto the street where
someone squats like you, where
the resinous poppy with its
capsules clings to your ears, where
above already blossom edges have
gone to grey…leaf
after leave put into place
& uncompleted sent away.
The short, startling lines in this first poem are typical for the entire collection where images of reality and dreams are mingled and blurred. His poetry is both personal reflection but also captures the universal feeling of calm while walking in the woods in autumn. In “autumn” he writes:
is silence & custom. autumn
is rake, wood, is a mild
chill upon the eyes &
unexpected gooseflesh. is also
the good old ready-to-fight feeling, soft, secret, skull-still
designs maturing. the leaves all burnt, sand
still warm beneath the ashes, you
feel it now upon your hand: something
wants to flee &something never leave…
The ghosts of the past, both personal and political, also pervade his poetry. The phrase “all the wasted time” in the following poem entitled “the stay” in particular stood out to me as an interesting commentary on the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of his country:
one evening they came
the dead of my house
back from the train-station. one
after the other, with
balled fists, reminiscent
of tulips in their
nigh-reserve, reminiscent,
in the long being-dead, of all
the wasted time.
In a poem entitled “culmitzsch” Seiler weaves together images of landscapes, ghosts and life in the former East Germany. The translator includes some excellent and helpful notes in the back of this edition and for this poem he explains that Culmitzch was a village in the GDR whose inhabitants were forced to move in order to make room for one of that former country’s largest uranium mines. Seiler’s poem about this abandoned place is chilling:
in the evening the sheep go rusty
over the wasted land, birds
as if snowed therein & darkened…
only under the rubble
the farmyards are still warm. the spoons
there by the spoons, the polish
by the boots & that little door
to the boot-room which moves you
to tears…
As always, Seagull Books has brought into English translation a fascinating collection of poetry. I had the opportunity to interview Alexander Booth, the translator of this collection which can be read here.
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