Psyche Running

A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Grünbein’s work over the past two decades.

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens—a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in—Grünbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages.

In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Grünbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Grünbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease.
 

“Rendered in spikily musical tones by Leeder, Grünbein’s latest is full of difficult consolations and a sighing sort of absurdity. . . . These eloquent, angular poems are rich in thoughtful noticing and a refreshingly idiosyncratic unpacking of history, geography, and myth.” Publishers Weekly
“The poems themselves are by turns shards, splintered but smoothly glazed vignettes of a shattered, and vehicles of the poet's self-recrimination and "shame". He is caught between impossible distance and fake identification. But Grunbein's shame is occasioned, too, by the memorializing pretence of lost innocence, postwar Germany's erasure of connection between the shattering of Dresden in 1945 and the shattering of glass in the pogrom of 1938. In Karen Leeder, he has found his definitive English voice.” Times Literary Supplement
"There is, in Grünbein’s perceptive, witty, and engaging verse, an irresistible quality that naturally invites a closer read. This volume, then, is not only an important addition to his available writing in English translation, but a wide ranging and vital introduction for anyone new to his work." rough ghosts

Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962, and he now lives in Berlin and Rome. He is professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has written more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, Porcelain, also published by Seagull Books. Karen Leeder is a writer, critic and prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature including work by Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun, Michael Krüger, Evelyn Schlag and Raoul Schrott.

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