Ron Winkler
Fragmented Waters
poetry
96 pp
Ron Winkler’s poetry is, to quote the title of one of his poems, a »directory for landscape tourists«, a description that applies to more or less all of us today, when we are confronted with the natural images of mountains, lakes and forests: »against the matt screen of a lake/ something exists. It could be significant./ animals graze on a surface./ perhaps they are authentic./ something old sinks on the horizon.«
Ron Winkler uses the almost faded metaphors borrowed from nature, which have bustled around in our linguistic usage since the age of Romanticism, and which are constantly revised in the social sphere, for a new description of nature. In his view, the sensory experience of nature is always imbued with a media presence, and »nature« becomes a screen on which to project a modern sense of life.
by all accounts. the colors of the sea.
seem overexcitable.
yet the water strikes you as rather thin.
there’s a competition between things; two windswept pines
rivaling for aesthetic inclines.
the tide inexhaustible – you could say
it was making payments on a larger debt.
the wind stroking the sea like an enthusiastic father.
(translated by Jake Schneider)
Rights sold
Mexiko – Posdata (poetry selection)
Slovakia – Skalna Ruza (poetry selection)
UK (English World) – Shearsman Books
Previous editions (right reverted):
Ukraine - Krokbooks (poetry selection)
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Reviews
»(...) for his consequent and unconventional lyrical writing. His poems are rocking our perception of the world and of language in a refreshing manner. At the same time the poems are featuring a humorous, verbally playful enthusiasm for experimentation.«
Basel Poetry Prize, Jury Statement
»A delicious playfulness of language, full of unexpected twists and turns, continually shifting registers of tone, and a witty use of puns and neologisms. (...)
Winkler‘s poems highlight the interconnectedness of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, of language and reality, of the empirical and transcendent. Perhaps language is ultimately the only tool we have to make sense of the world ‘out there’, but we can have great fun with this in our attempt to do so.«
Ian Seed, Poetry Nation Review
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