The Art of Topiary: Poems (Multilingual Edition) - Softcover

Wagner, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571314962 ISBN 13: 9781571314963

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2017

Synopsis

A collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.

The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long and careful collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals―acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time―into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations. Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun.

Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Wagner is the recipient of the 2017 Georg Büchner Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious honors in literature. He has published six collections of poems since 2001, as well as two collections of essays, several edited volumes, and a number of translations. For his poetry, which has been translated into more than thirty languages, Wagner has received fellowships from the German Academy, the Villa Massimo in Rome, the Villa Aurora, and elsewhere. His literary awards include the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Award for Poetry, and the Friedrich Hölderlin Award. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Wagner lives in Berlin.

David Keplinger is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Another City. He has won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Book Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the DC, Danish, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

essay on gnats

as if every character had fled
all at once from the newspaper
and hovered as a swarm in the air,

they hover as a swarm in the air,
transmitting from the awful news
nothing. prudent muses, emaciated

pegasusses humming nothing but themselves
into the ear; borne of the last band
of smoke when the candle is snuffed,

and so weightless it’s hardly possible to say:
they are. appearing more as shadow
from an alternate world

now cast into ours, they dance,
limbs now so thin as if drawn
with a pencil; tiny sphinxes are their bodies;

rosetta stone, without the stone.

* * *

augustín lópez: the art of topiary
From the series: “three possible books”

he set out every dawn to do his work
while everyone was sleeping. in sun and rain
the man was there, to make the wild box
jump through rings, cutting it along the gates
into globes, into pyramids, column gardens,
just so: so we heard him keeping time

with scissors, saw how, sacrificing time
for anything else, he willed with wirework
the natural world into new forms: gardens
of labyrinths, minotaurs and the golden rain
of danae; with portcullis gates,
then towers, walls, so that, as if by bricks,

the landscape of a fabulous city, boxed
by walls, emerged. it was met at that time
by a topiary sea, upon which crossed frigates
of tree-envoys. the days he did his work,
even sunday, he went as one who reigns
an ever-reaching empire, postured in his garden

as its king until just silence was its guardian.
only a light wind twitched the wild box,
trimmed at its leaves. why should we rant
about this? don’t all artists at some time
or other dissolve into their work?
we stood for a while in front of the gates,

then two boys dared to climb over. agape
they found surrounded by gardens
a gentleman’s image as his last great work,
and within it as the heart, hidden in the box,
a bird’s nest left from wintertime.
the eggs the color of marble, rain-

flecked, hard―and nothing seemed to rouse
when one listened to them. we gathered
fallen pieces for the tree at christmastime.
but from the master gardener and his garden,
no more words. soon we saw that on the box
young shoots were growing, the work

of nourishing rain. so the garden’s details faded
and in time we would forget his work.
behind the gates burst flowers from the box.

* * *

the merman
for Robin Robertson

before husum, with the first catch
they pulled me on board, the obulos
of a shell in my hand, cold as halibut,
the herring and their silver applause

surrounding me on deck. their hot grog
burnt me down to the fish ribs,
but i got used to other things: to the clock
and its bells. to snow. to featherbeds.

they found the yokel, the jealous one,
drowned in a puddle. a seed
arose. one morning when the cod
lay rotting at my door, i took that as a sign.

i left behind the angst of the sleeping,
who fear water in their dreams, my prints
licked away by the sun, and i left the gaping
neighbors, the mothers and their prams,

their sons with fish lips and webs.
unhurried i sank back down to the palace,
its walls of flounder eyes, where my wife
grinds salt for the sea. i became my own myth.

* * *

quince paté
From the series: “Eighteen Pies”

when october hung them in the branches,
bulging lanterns, it was time: quinces,
we plucked quinces, heaving in our baskets
yellows to the kitchen

and into water. pear and apple ripened
toward their names, to a simple sweetness―
different from the quinces on their branches
hanging in far corners

of my alphabet, in the garden’s latin,
hard and foreign in aroma: we sliced,
quartered, cored the flesh (four huge
hands, two smaller ones)

shadowed in the juicer steam, added
sugar, heat, effort toward something
so raw it resisted the mouth. who could or would want
to understand quinces,

jellies set in bulbous jars for the
darkest days, lined up on our shelves in
a basement of such days, where they
shone, are still shining.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1571314962
• ISBN 13: 9781571314963
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: Multiple languages
• Number of pages: 144