tudes, Hardcover

Exploring longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, tudes is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayr cker's almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayr cker's case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation.

The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayr cker transform the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which "opens everything up." Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayr cker to pour in everything from notes on doctor's visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody.

Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in tudes. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayr cker's distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.

Friederike Mayr cker is widely considered one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published over eighty works since 1956, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children's books. She lives in Vienna. Donna Stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry and one of prose. She has translated works from Ludwig Hohl, Alexander Kluge, and Friederike Mayr cker. She lives in Berlin.