Silke Scheuermann
And I Asked The Bird – Lyrical Moments
fiction, poetry
248pp (48,200 words)
Who hasn’t wondered at some point what goes through writers’ heads as they read books by their colleagues?
Author Silke Scheuermann illuminates such »lyrical moments« in her new book, writing critically and passionately about the books and poems that have inspired her. Astute, witty and empathetic, she reflects on writing as a sketch of another body, as a way of accessing something magical and mysterious. The circumstances of a work’s creation and the life of its author are also taken into account.
This volume collects Silke Scheuermann’s body of work on poetry thus far, bringing together her Wiesbaden lectures on poetics, her interpretations of poems written for the Frankfurt Anthology founded by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, as well as reviews, radio programmes, essays and talks. Ranging from German Romanticism to contemporary international work, a deeply personal literary canon emerges.
Reviews
»Without abandoning interest in certain general contexts of literature, Scheuermann focuses on the precious details, the poetic artifacts in their own beauty, foreignness, bulkiness.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»a lucid collection of essays«
ZEIT online
»Especially with her poetry, Silke Scheuermann interprets and comments current events in a subtle, never dogmatizing way, using a delicate yet powerful imagery. In doing so, she achieves a characteristic and extraordinarily high aesthetic quality.«
Bertolt Brecht Prize, The Jury
»Silke Scheuermann's poetic metamorphosis leads us back to that epochal point that has us remember the possibilities of being human in the age of scientific and technical self-exaltation.«
Bertolt Brecht Prize, Laudatory Speech
»While life daily confronts us with boundaries and crises of our times, the art of the Droste- and Hölty-Prize Winner shows us new ways of seeing. (...) Scheuermann is an advocate of truthfulness, a defender of beauty, promising honesty in a time too obsessed with irony.«
Am Erker
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