Pitch & Glint

Lutz Seiler

£14.99

We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.

To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.


And Other Stories
6 September 2023
ISBN: 9781913505769
Paperback
112 pages

From the publisher

Translated by Stefan Tobler

2023 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents’ suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, ‘You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.’