An Audible Blue: Selected Poems
AUTHOR
Klaus Merz
TRANSLATOR
Marc Vincenz
Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.” This seminal volume brings together selections from Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).
Reviews
“Marc Vincenz has brought these dynamic poems to life in English: his lucid translations make these varied and vivid poems delightful, incisive, responses to the world and life imagined in startling images that upend our ways of seeing: he provides a visual glossary of the poetry of everyday life: “A brackish mouth / speaks to the dead. But a new celestial body / rolls in with the last wave.” “Go down / on one knee / before the Capuchin monkey!” Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s poems in An Audible Blue (1963-2016) are reanimated in this precise and energetic translation. Whether in the brief, haiku-like early poems or the prose poems or longer verse poems, the language is seamless and draws us in.”
— Maxine Chernoff
"Through all the mirrors of his compact mind, Klaus Merz propels his poetic pensées into an accelerating motion like a scribbler’s short breaths or an estranged Our Father. In Vincenz’s prodigious and perfectly weighted German to English translation these providential, charged word-moments collide in a benediction of sorts that transcends ancestral time and the Swiss countryside familiar to Merz. Here the miniscule expands and immensity collapses into itself. Here, also, the poet’s kingly proclamations dive deeply into the dreamlike magic of eons and spins into creation a wordplay of wonder.”
—Dennis Daly
“Reading Merz's spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato's cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows.”
—Nin Andrews
Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician, and artist. He has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, Spells for the Wicked, All the Tricks of Language, and IRØNCLAD. Vincenz’s translation of prize-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’s An Audible Blue received the 2023 Massachusetts Book Prize for Translated Literature.
Publishing editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, Vincenz lives in Western Massachusetts.
Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinianand his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust, Unexpected Development, Helios Hauls and firm.