Wallless Space

by Ernst Meister, Graham Foust (Translator), Samuel Frederick (Translator)

Overview

"Meister's work is mesmerizingly succinct and elusive, but also ambitious to a degree almost unheard-of among presently-observed aesthetic moments. Highly recommended."—The Huffington Post

"Foust and Frederick have done us all a great favor. Meister's poetry could have been lost in the rift of time that he wrote so elegantly about."—The Rumpus

"A good, interesting collection, in a solid translation. . . . In Time's Rift is a welcome volume and certainly suggests that Meister is a significant poet deserving greater attention."—Complete Review

Wallless Space is a translation of German poet Ernst Meister's final collection and the last of the informal trilogy which also includes In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012) and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave, forthcoming 2015). Meister's poems are brief but dense, intense but playful; obsessed with mortality and the intersections of the everyday and the infinite.

There's nary a Maker,
there's nary a witness,
there's only Nature,
who brings herself
about herself, she alone—
and I'm supposedly lonely
in her?

Ernst Meister (1911–79) was born in Hagen, Germany. He was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize.

Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver.

Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern UniversityPress, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933517940
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany, and studied first theology, then literature, art history, and philosophy (the latter under Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer) at various German universities. After the publication of his first book in 1932, he published no poetry for two decades, a silent spell that ultimately gave way to the prolific last third of his life, over the course of which he produced more than sixteen volumes of verse as well as numerous other literary and visual works. Often compared to Paul Celan because of the brevity and difficulty of his poems, Meister tends toward a more abstract existentialism that renders his work both intensely emotional and inimitably strange. Having written outside the dominant literary circles of his time, he remains relatively unknown, though he was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, having been informed of the honor just days before his death.

Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver.

Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern UniversityPress, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.

Editorial Reviews

08/18/2014
In his final collection, German poet Meister (1911–1979) grapples with notions of permanence and decay, and comes to the realization that it is the finality of death that dictates the inventiveness of language. “The grave,” he writes, “would be/ the very place/ of storytelling.” Spare and minimalist, Meister’s lines are unrestricted in their imaginative bounds; it as if successive poems follow the thread of a single thought into its many permutations. Each page contains a small poem—or a fragment—that seems to drift into the next one. Meister strikes a balance between the metaphysical exploration of sense and lyrical expressions of a self-consciousness aware of the limitations of language. There is “A false/ note in the air/ and a false/ eye in the light,” he warns; nothing being exactly what it seems when it is framed and caught in his distilled vocabulary. Throughout, Meister remains unsentimental, even ambivalent in his approach: “spirit/ or dust, it’s all/ the same in the universe” But there is a kind of wonder that permeates, too: “We live/ off the distances,” he begins in the second untitled section. “Death/ seems to us/ as far as the highest/ star.” Like his subject matter, Meister’s writing is ominous, intangible, and inescapable. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly