Exploring longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, etudes is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayrocker's almost daily entries give us a unique...

"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language", said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems – dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, el...

Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in "An Infusion of Violets". The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar's...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously wrote that while he did...

"Rubble Flora" is a selection of poems from the distinguished, half-century-long career of German poet Volker Braun. Born in the former East Germany, Braun is a humane, witty, brave, and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of...

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann's paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamu...

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. "A Cry in the Snow" often draws on these two fert...

Norway. The 1800s. Endre must to take over the family farm from his father – his father, who swings the sickle and sharpens the scythe, and says this is the only way in which rocks and stones and mounts and waves can still be ours. But Endre is stran...

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Ar...

Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up "Monk's Eye" on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems – which can be read in...