Sebald’s poems

The fact that W. G. Sebald, who has come to be recognized as one of the most important prose writers of contemporary Europe, was also a prolific and accomplished writer of lyric poetry remains something of a well-kept secret. Sebald wrote poetry throughout most of his life, from the early 1960s until his death in 2001, publishing it chiefly in literary magazines and anthologies. His first major literary work was the extensive epic poem Nach der Natur, which was published in 1988. Toward the turn of the millennium, after his international reputàtion had been established by Die Ausgewanderten and Die Ringe des Saturn, he seems to have devoted more and more attention to his poetry. When he passed away, he had just published a collection of brief English-language lyric poems entitled For Years Now, and was also working on a closely related German lyric cycle, which was published in 2003 under the title Unerzählt. In 2008, finally, all of his published poems (apart from those included in the aforementioned volumes) along with a selection of hitherto unpublished poems, were collected and printed posthumously under the title Über das Land und das Wasser, which recently appeared in English translation. / Axel Englund,The German Quarterly