A publishing landmark��he first major collection of poems by one of the late twentieth century's literary masters
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German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that The Guardian called �� new
literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir, part travelogue.��Its publication put Sebald in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Yet Sebald's brilliance as a poet has been largely
unacknowledged��ntil now.
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Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, the nearly one hundred poems in Across the Land and the Water range from those Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right
before his untimely death in 2001. Featuring eighty-eight poems published in English for the first time and thirty-three from unpublished manuscripts, this collection also brings together all
the verse he placed in books and journals during his lifetime.
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Here are Sebald's trademark themes��rom nature and history (��vents of war within/a life cracks/across the Order of the World/spreading from Cassiopeia/a diffuse pain reaching into/the upturned
leaves on the trees��, to wandering and wondering (�� have even begun/to speak in foreign tongues/roaming like a nomad in my own/town . . .��, to oblivion and memory (��f you knew every
cranny/of my heart/you would yet be ignorant/of the pain my happy/memories bring��.
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Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to his superb body of work, and this unique collection is bound to become a classic in its own right.
