A collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.
The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long and careful collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner's originals-acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time-into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations. Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun.
Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.
About the Author :
Jan Wagner is the recipient of the 2017 Georg Bchner Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious honors in literature. He has published six collections of poems since 2001, as well as two collections of essays, several edited volumes, and a number of translations. For his poetry, which has been translated into more than thirty languages, Wagner has received fellowships from the German Academy, the Villa Massimo in Rome, the Villa Aurora, and elsewhere. His literary awards include the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Award for Poetry, and the Friedrich Hlderlin Award. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Wagner lives in Berlin.
David Keplinger is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Another City. He has won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Book Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the DC, Danish, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.
Review :
"It's the precision that impresses so much, the delicacy and the relish by which objects--usually objects--are detailed and transcribed, and the playfulness also, nearly always culminating in some igneous and entirely persuasive image. Jan Wagner has the timing and presentation skills of a close-up magician."--Simon Armitage
"David Keplinger's translation of Jan Wagner's The Art of Topiary seems to rise out of a love of language that's almost mathematical in music and pace. Thus, each line is well made, composed of lyrical density and movement, and the reader experiences this--not as conceit, but as actual. Each poem feels alive with intention, teaching us how to listen to its music. Here control becomes part of meaning. The mechanics of nature--where the organic becomes metaphysical, or the natural sculpted--are primary to the collection. This masterful accretive affect works in The Art of Topiary. Wagner's vision has been exacted with care and know-how as Keplinger carries into translation the truth of a gesture, and this is where poetry resides."--Yusef Komunyakaa
"To say that Jan Wagner is the best German poet of his generation would be true - but what does it mean? Perhaps we should first ask: what does it mean to be a poet, in our time of migrations, violence, hybrid wars? Where does one find a moment in which 'melodies unheard' still startle us? His Art of Topiary isn't the practice of mere formal clippings of the natural world according to our own most current notion of beauty--but finding the ageless intensity of tenderness within each thing he sees. In our most violent of centuries: here is the poet who is willing to stop, and stand still, in the intense brief moment of being, and see the largesse in the smallest of astonishments."--Ilya Kaminsky
"Jan Wagner's poems pair the playful celebration of language and the virtuoso mastery of form, musical sensuality and intellectual concision. Though they originate from the dialogue with mayor poetic traditions, they are completely contemporary. Natural phenomena as well as pieces of art, subjects of life as well as world history are part of the reality his poems make accessible, letting moments emerge in which the world shows itself as if for the very first time. His poetic art and language sharpens our sense as well as our thoughts." --German Academy for Language and Literature Citation for Jan Wagner, the Georg Buchner Prize 2017
