Nico Bleutge gives voice to these questions and forges his own unique rhythm from them. Poems about beginnings, about language before language, and about the relationship between memory and presence. Time lengthens and contracts in the play of sounds: ‘This gnawing, twisting together / of clouds, begin: not one / syllable to stand, compress / everything within’. The shimmering title sequence follows hawks and starlings beside the Tiber. Here, vocabulary meets magic words. We see cracks in the images that resemble the cracks in the landscape. And memory feeds in seemingly incidental details. Like the sound of breathing, which is always there but which you don’t notice until you turn your attention to it. With a keen feeling for language, Nico Bleutge explores the gaps in our perception and shows us the power of words, sonorous, sensual, simultaneously concrete and imaginary.

‘Before articulating a message, these poems are all music, in the finest tradition.’ Jochen Jung, DIE ZEIT

*New poems from Nico Bleutge about joy and loss

*Poems about beginning, about memory and presence

*‘This sparkling and glittering of the poetic texture has become the hallmark of the poet Nico Bleutge.’ Michael Braun, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, on ‘nachts leuchten die schiffe’