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Reviews
Shadow Lands: Selected Poems by Ruth Mead, Matthew Mead, Michael Hamburger, Johannes Bobrowski
levitybooks's review against another edition
2.0
Featured in my Jan 2021 Wrap Up
Do you like rivers?
Do you want 200+ poems about rivers?
...Ok, I'm being facetious, this is good nature poetry, but as mentioned in the foreword, the cultural significance was lost even to Western Germans at the time of publication, only really resonating with Eastern Germany.
Based on the foreword by the translators this is how we should see it. 'East German poetry was expected to be 'forward-looking' after the war and Bobrowski stood out in looking backwards. [...] Bobrowski's statement of hope was similar to that of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, in that he would poetically recreate the vanished world'. Bobrowski is known as a Christian poet who had damaged health from being a soldier in Russia and being held as a POW by the soviets until 1949, on his release he emerged out of nowhere after he released Shadow Lands, which sold out and became popular in East and West Germanies.
And though he has a place in the Western Canon, all of this still leaves me sort of clueless at what this was about. The meaning is very allusive, and the form and content of these poems is tedious, open, empty, cold. A setting without meaning.
This is essentially the only English translation (by Ruth & Matthew Mead) of the collected works of Bobrowski's poetry — Sarmation Time (1961), Shadowland Rivers (1962), and Weathersigns (1966). It's presented in chronological order. I wanted to believe this arrangement was more than arbitrary. .. that this was an epic poem of sorts... and the tone does lighten from the barren wilderness of Sarmation Time ("Graveyard") eventually to humanity (last poem being "The Word "Man" ").
But the truth is, this is well-written poetry that does not work for me. I do feel I can grasp, engage, visualize poetry. But this typifies the best that I cannot engage with. Nature poetry without humanity just has no relation to my mood? It felt like Seamus Heaney's poetry, but with the sense of human history and presence replaced with shadows and death of nature. It was cold and dark.
It reads as if Bobrowski decided to live in the woods and every morning wrote a poem about only what he saw in the empty wilderness around him.
To be critically negative, the majority of Bobrowski's poems consist of:
He does play nicely with space on the page and with enjambment, yes yes, but that doesn't disguise the emptiness and repetition in his work.
There were a couple of nice ones to me, that normally stood out from the rest in having a personal tone, or being more focused on JUST the river, or JUST the house. My favourites were Return, Weathersigns, Log-Cabin, Experience, Esther and Mobile by Calder. I placed Experience up above as an excerpt.
But yes. I don't think there's much to understand here. If you like reading about nature, without any meaning, then maybe you'll like this. It is an exercise in just how many poems can be written without feeling, but only nature. I'd encourage most people to find something with more passion, I'm honestly kind of disappointed I couldn't connect with this.
Do you like rivers?
Do you want 200+ poems about rivers?
Experience
Signs,
cross and fish,
drawn on the stone wall of the cave.
The procession of men
descends into the earth.
The ground vaults,
weed, greenish, grown
through the bushes.
The river rises
against my breast,
the voice of sand:
open
I can not get through
your dead
drift in me
...Ok, I'm being facetious, this is good nature poetry, but as mentioned in the foreword, the cultural significance was lost even to Western Germans at the time of publication, only really resonating with Eastern Germany.
Based on the foreword by the translators this is how we should see it. 'East German poetry was expected to be 'forward-looking' after the war and Bobrowski stood out in looking backwards. [...] Bobrowski's statement of hope was similar to that of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, in that he would poetically recreate the vanished world'. Bobrowski is known as a Christian poet who had damaged health from being a soldier in Russia and being held as a POW by the soviets until 1949, on his release he emerged out of nowhere after he released Shadow Lands, which sold out and became popular in East and West Germanies.
And though he has a place in the Western Canon, all of this still leaves me sort of clueless at what this was about. The meaning is very allusive, and the form and content of these poems is tedious, open, empty, cold. A setting without meaning.
This is essentially the only English translation (by Ruth & Matthew Mead) of the collected works of Bobrowski's poetry — Sarmation Time (1961), Shadowland Rivers (1962), and Weathersigns (1966). It's presented in chronological order. I wanted to believe this arrangement was more than arbitrary. .. that this was an epic poem of sorts... and the tone does lighten from the barren wilderness of Sarmation Time ("Graveyard") eventually to humanity (last poem being "The Word "Man" ").
But the truth is, this is well-written poetry that does not work for me. I do feel I can grasp, engage, visualize poetry. But this typifies the best that I cannot engage with. Nature poetry without humanity just has no relation to my mood? It felt like Seamus Heaney's poetry, but with the sense of human history and presence replaced with shadows and death of nature. It was cold and dark.
It reads as if Bobrowski decided to live in the woods and every morning wrote a poem about only what he saw in the empty wilderness around him.
To be critically negative, the majority of Bobrowski's poems consist of:
[nature noun] [motion] x20
the river flows into the
wind through the woods, and moss
of the dark shadow of the hut,
where the flame flickers,
against the wall.
He does play nicely with space on the page and with enjambment, yes yes, but that doesn't disguise the emptiness and repetition in his work.
There were a couple of nice ones to me, that normally stood out from the rest in having a personal tone, or being more focused on JUST the river, or JUST the house. My favourites were Return, Weathersigns, Log-Cabin, Experience, Esther and Mobile by Calder. I placed Experience up above as an excerpt.
But yes. I don't think there's much to understand here. If you like reading about nature, without any meaning, then maybe you'll like this. It is an exercise in just how many poems can be written without feeling, but only nature. I'd encourage most people to find something with more passion, I'm honestly kind of disappointed I couldn't connect with this.
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