So proud and delighted to have an introduction in this wonderful and timely volume translated by Martyn Crucefix:
Peter Huchel, These numbered days, A brilliant book for our times, out this month with Shearsman Books.
See the publishers website, but also Martyn's fascinating blogs on the poet, who deserves to be so much better known in English.
“With Brecht, Benn, Bobrowski and Celan, Peter Huchel is one of a handful of essential post-war poets in the German language. A precise observer of natural pheno-mena, Huchel is above all a realist whose metaphors take us deep into the social and historical landscape, into zones of devastation and despair, the zero-hour of isolation. His world is devoid of illusion or sentimentality; there is no redemption, at most an exactitude that is itself a confirmation of what is human and real. Lifted out of the schismatic currents of the Cold War era by Martyn Crucefix’s supple and arrestingly sensual translations, Huchel surprises us as a fresh and startling voice for our own numbered days.” —Iain Galbraith