Ror Wolf: In a State of Expanded Calm


Ror Wolf Werke

Ror Wolf
In a State of Expanded Calm

Collected Poems
poetry
Edited by Friedmar Apel

480pp

A composed tone dominates Ror Wolf’s poems, although they deal with curious events, accidents and erotic confusions. Parts of bodies protrude into rooms, pistols are drawn and travellers fade away mutely into unknown territories. The lightness of the language and its artful comedy are only two aspects of this world, behind whose description the sceptical gaze of the melancholic is always in evidence.

With the inclusion of unpublished early poems this is the first one-volume collection to bring together all of Ror Wolf’s poetry.

»Ror Wolf’s uplifting and rhythmic prose is discontinuous, fantastic and breathtakingly musical. Cinematic almost, his love for jazz, film and slapstick, for Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy is always palpable.«
Faust Kultur

»Wolf’s texts are impeccably unacademic. There is no hidden philosophy, no professional wordplay, no scholarly wink with the eye. His experiences do not derive from a literary life, but from his findings in a literature of our everyday life, without longing glances on so-called sensuous full narratives.«
Brigitte Kronauer

»In his prose, his poetry and his word and sound collages Ror Wolf inimitably combines linguistic artistry and grotesque comedy with a terse and compassionate perception of reality and its fundamental constants, fear and hope, pleasure and decay. He is a master of the cryptic and utopian play with the primal matter of poetry.«
Friedrich Hölderlin Award, Jury statement

»What would the world be without Ror Wolf (…) Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»A fantastic spectacle! It is exactly this fantastic accumulation of events which makes the texts so exclusive and entrancing. The truth of form manifests itself in immense clusters and their reciprocal relativization. In fact, these accumulations have been dominant for a long time in almost all areas of Western society, publicly and privately: in the supermarkets and in the news, in the disaster statistics and capital markets, even in love and death.«
DIE WELT


The Collected Works of Ror Wolf. The New Edition for the New Century

The annotated edition of Ror Wolf not only brings together all previously published books by Ror Wolf, but also work which appeared in out-of-the-way places or was not printed at all. It includes early drafts as well as manuscript versions and for the first time makes accessible a broad selection of essays, reviews, speeches and correspondence. An afterword by the editor describes the genesis and reception of the individual works.

Reviews

»Pure joy. (...) There’s no explanation yet as to why this mixture of ›excitement and scare, lust for realism, importance and concision‹, of eloquence, humour and horror moves and exhilarates readers like it does, what makes for its strong pull. An enigmatic work, yet suitbale for daily use.«
Frankfurter Rundschau (launch of the Collected Works)

»In over forty years, Ror Wolf has created an opus that is singular in its powerful visual intricateness, its wild, chilly humour, and its magical simulation of reality. He is a classic of postmodern literature, he has been for quite a while.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung

More titles by Ror Wolf

Ror Wolf: Continuation of the ReportRor Wolf: December's Suddenly Creeping-In ColdRor Wolf: Hans Waldmann's AdventuresRor Wolf: News From the Inhabited WorldRor Wolf: Pfeifer’s TravelsRor Wolf: Pilzer and PelzerRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer's Observations on SilenceRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer’s Encyclopaedia for Intrepid Readers in Three VolumesRor Wolf: Raoul Tranchirer’s Notes from a Cut-Up LifeRor Wolf: The Advantages of DarknessRor Wolf: The Dangers of the Great PlainRor Wolf: The PoemsRor Wolf: The Various Consequences of the ImaginationRor Wolf: Two or Three Years Later: Forty-nine DigressionsRor Wolf: Various Ways of Losing One’s Peace of Mind