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Darkness Spoken brings together two previous collections and numerous uncollected poems, many in their first English translation, by Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Influence to prominent writers as Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Bachmann belonged to the legendary literary circle Gruppe 47, a membership shared by Paul Celan and Günter Grass. These elegant poems are subtle philosophical inquiries as much as they are poetic investigations. In them, Bachmann struggles with the matter of language, nature, transcendence, the post-WWII condition, and "being." (Bachmann's doctoral thesis was on Heidegger — his influence on her own thought is marked.) This stunning collection of a sometimes-overlooked poet's work is long overdue.