I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other

Ulrike Almut Sandig's second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable.

Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence in these poems from Ulrike Almut Sandig. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary concerns: Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word "Grimm" rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by passionate, expansive empathy--and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.

About the author

Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in East Germany and lives in Berlin with her family. Two books of stories and four volumes of her poetry have been published to date. Karen Leeder is a writer, translator, and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford.

Product details

• Authors: Karen Leeder, Ulrike Almut Sandig
• Assisted by: Karen Leeder (Translation)
• Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.05.2023
• EAN: 9781803091853
• ISBN: 978-1-80309-185-3
• No. of pages: 80
• Dimensions: 203 mm x 127 mm x 8 mm
• Weight: 130 g
• Series: The Seagull Library of German
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies