Böcker av Lutz Seiler

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, "You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound."

In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler's non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing essays that are different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler's anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, 'the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium'. Other essays focus on poetry, including his awakening to it while waiting in an army truck on his military service, and there are pieces on German poets such as Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel. The title essay describes the poet Huchel's notebook, a kind of dictionary of images organised by mood and location.Providing a perfect entry to Seiler's work, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe's most original writers speak with openness and insight in essays full of a poet's attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.

November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter set out for life in the West. Their son Carl heads to Berlin where he discovers anarchy, love and poetry. Musical and incantatory, Seiler's novel Star 111 tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family which must find its way back together.