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Wickerwork

by

Translated from by

Published: May 5, 2025

Paperback ISBN: 9781962770248

SKU: N/A Category: Tags: ,
This item will be released on May 5, 2025.
$18.00

Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.

Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”

With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.

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Praise

Christian Lehnert makes nature’s wonders shine. His poems expand our view of life—and its inexpressible reason for being.
Der Sonntag
The wealth of this collection speaks for itself. Worldly wisdom meets playfulness and clarity.
Landshuter Zeitung
Compared to the narratives of crisis in current poetry, [Lehnert’s] verses gracefully step out of line, wrestling for a hidden truth to which there is ultimately only one key: poetry.
Björn Hayer, Frankfurter Rundschau
Lehnert [draws on] the two classic stylistic devices of verse meter and rhyme . . . certainly a tricky undertaking, but one in which he succeeds.
Wolfgang Matz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
His poetic expressiveness is Lehnert’s piety. His poems are chorales that celebrate life in all its manifestations. Despite the austere form, they seem simple and straightforward and are beautiful precisely because of that.
Jörg Magenau, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Lehnert's collection of poems is like an outstretched hand that one would like to grasp and then extend to others.
Irmtraud Gutschke, neues deutschland
Christian Lehnert has put all these interconnections on paper sensitively, in rich poetic language and with natural-philosophical prudence.
Andreas Puff-Trojan, Die Presse
Nothing distracts. Rhythm and metre create an ornamentally pulsating movement on which the ship in the loom of thought sets all sails in a stimulating, pointed manner, but above all—obeying the form of the lyrical genre—in extreme brevity and conciseness and simultaneous richness of thought.
Klaus-Martin Bresgott, Zeitzeichen
Christian Lehnert has put all the interweaving aspects [of God and nature] onto paper in a sensitive, natural-philosophical way, in poetic language inspired by Baroque poetry.
Andreas Puff-Trojan, SWR2
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