Votives : Selected Poems from the Literary Remains

Chosen from among Kuno Raeber's extensive literary remains and arranged thematically, these poems plumb the depths of his spiritual and cultural heritage emanating from ancient worlds, by means of exact descriptions of everyday life that open up into imaginary landscapes. In an interview from 1964, Raeber said he was determined to show "the present in the past and the past in the present."

Kuno Raeber (1922-1992) grew up in Lucerne, Switzerland, went on to study philosophy, literature, and history in Basel, Zurich, Geneva, and Paris. In 1958, he settled in Munich as a freelance writer, where he spent most of his life, aside from trips abroad to Oberlin as Max Kade Writer-in-Residence and to the Swiss Institute in Rome. He won a number of prestigious literary prizes and produced a commanding body of poems, stories, novels, plays, essays, reviews, and translations. Stuart Friebert spent an undergraduate year in Germany as one of the first U.S. exchange students after World War II, after which he finished a PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in German Language & Literature. He founded Oberlin’s Creative Writing Program, which he directed until retiring. Along the way, with colleagues, he cofounded Field Magazine, later the Field Translation Series and Oberlin College Press. Christiane Wyrwa is the coeditor, with her husband Matthias Klein, of Kuno Raeber’s Collected Works in seven volumes.