The poem works with patterns of phrase and space. Orders of words and deaths. Dispersed, with the precision and craft of stone inscriptions, the verses transform the page into sites to represent loss and knowledge.The poem cannot retrieve all disintegrations. But recovers some in the ebb and flow of imagination across a sundered tradition. Depositing what it has recollected fretted through the caesuras of history.The poem opening from the past opens the subject. It knows the body porous, but selective. A writing that reconceives with no endpoint.Continuities like veins of impurity in a turquoise bead. Continuities like cracks in the faience of a Pharaonic amulet. Continuities like indigo-dyed threads in an ikat shawl.Faults. Faults in grammar. Faults and forms in dialogue to adopt the otherwise.One reader read through her station on the Berlin U-Bahn. One reader asks if this is a journal of the soul. One reader could be the angel of memory.> o

A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them. A truly heterogeneous space, whose land- and mindscapes remain deeply scarred - but also nourished - by the events and concepts of not only the twentieth century. Although the poems in this book written over a period of four years are distinguished by annually changing forms, they have been arranged not chronologically but calendrically.