In the House, Still Light
AUTHOR
Klaus Merz
TRANSLATOR
Marc Vincenz
In the House, Still Light is the most recent poetry collection by Switzerland’s 2024 “Grand Prix Literatur” prize winner, Klaus Merz.
Klaus Merz, a consummate master of the short form, captures the wonders and travails of aging in the alpine countryside reflected in these Taoist influenced poems and prose poems, which have been sculpted by the aging artist with every single word dutifully and carefully considered. Questions of mortality and the afterlife are considered and reflect in the forests, along the creeks and rivers, the mountains and in the blue sky stretching above.
Reviews
“Marc Vincenz lucid translations make Klaus Merz’ 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. Whether in his minimalist, haiku-like poems or the prose poems or longer verse poems, his language is seamless and draws us in.“
—Maxine Chernoff
“Merz is like a diamond cutter—he writes of the inevitable and ineffable with incisive, shimmering clarity.”
—Nin Andrews
“A master of the precise apercu, of distillation and insinuation: a poet who carefully weighs each and every word, color and tone. An autumn wind wafts through these poems. There is talk of departure, death and impermanence; but also, time, and time again, of the beauty of an endangered world. Klaus Merz dares—without wavering, but with a tender meticulousness—to do something that has been the task of all poets for millennia …”
—Neue Züricher Zeiting
“Subtle milestones define Klaus Merz’ poems; no blaring voices, rather the reverberations between the lines, carried on by this gentle melancholy: sketches from plain life; close encounters between ordinary people … observations and minutia from encounters and journeys; then suddenly this metaphysical commentary on one’s lot and life … In these poems you will encounter moods and atmospheres that all of use have stumbled upon at some point; yet here, they are sealed in by most ingenious words and retain all their worth.”
—Literatur&Kunst (a magazine of literature + art)
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.