Praise
Timeless, ecstatic, original: Richard Sieburth creates an intricate music for Christian Lehnert's crystalline poems. Lehnert sees nature—amoebas, bats, lichen, whales—in a mystic glow reflected from Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and the Zohar. To read these poems is to put a finger on the pulse of life, to feel algae as a membrane, 'its yesterdays and tomorrows / sheathed in slime,' and amethyst as 'sediment in shock.' An incandescent experience.
— Rosanna Warren
Richard Sieburth stands among the truly masterful English translators of our time. His perfect dictional pitch and musical dexterity, combined with staggering erudition, ring out not only from every line he translates, but in his choice of what to render and his framing of it all with prose that lights the way there and back. Sieburth’s latest translational revelation comes in the form of Christian Lehnert’s Wickerwork, the supple, metaphysicianal weave of which seems to emerge from several lifetimes of looking and reflection: “There the growth of things is never in doubt. // The linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.”
— Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems
Emily Dickinson reminds us that 'microscopes are prudent in an emergency.' These visionary miniatures understand the essential part for the whole. With sheer compression and economy of expression, Lehnert gives us, through the material world, miraculously, the vast mystery of being on earth. Once again, Richard Sieburth’s work is astonishing and musical. As one says, good things come in small packages. It couldn’t be truer for this book.
— Peter Gizzi
‘No mortal word / can measure / what blows away,’ Christian Lehnert reflects in ‘Windgrass,’ one of the many dazzling poems included in Wickerwork, marvelously brought into English by Richard Sieburth. Yet the reader must also marvel at how Lehnert’s exquisitely measured words come close to rendering what he deems impossible to grasp: not only what inevitably ‘blows away,’ but what Hopkins called the inscape of each thing to which Lehnert as naturalist, mystic, and poet turns his contemplative eye, and his ear—the infinitely delicate pleating together of creation and ‘the uncreated All’ into which everything is woven.
— Daniel Tobin
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