In Time's Rift / Im Zeitspalt

"[Meister's] enviable combination of lyrical talent and existential preoccupation . . . is not a peaceful, divine perception but rather a distillation of despair . . . derangement seems almost justified."—Will Stone, The Times Literary Supplement

Ernst Meister's brief, afflicted poems attend to the writer's lifelong obsessions with being and mortality. First published in 1976 and appearing for the first time in English in its entirety, it is a collection equal parts philosophical rigor and lived experience.

We
had a face-off in the light.
Dust
floated around us, tenderly.

Ernst Meister (1911–1979) was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize.

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). 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 University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.