Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a
landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village
brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive
poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy,
traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative
force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the
unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood
innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in
an essay, "You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the
instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the
story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than
narrating the story, it narrates its sound."