Wickerwork
Apr 2025 · New York Review of Books
Ebook
140
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
Vivifying poetry of nature and the spirit — explore a mystical world of hawkmoths and elvers, skylarks and salamanders, with the shimmering grace of Gary Snyder
"Lehnert's imagination is precise, patient, yearning... [it] documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement
Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.
Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”
With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.
"Lehnert's imagination is precise, patient, yearning... [it] documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement
Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.
Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”
With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.
About the author
Christian Lehnert was born in Dresden in 1969. Since 1995 he has published poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, and in literary journals, including German Academy of Arts’ Sinn und Form. In 2010, Lehnert’s libretto for Hans Werner Henze’s opera Phaedra was performed at the Barbican. Lehnert’s work has been awarded several prizes including the Eichendorff Prize in 2016, and the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2018. He is the head of the Liturgical Studies department at the University of Leipzig.
Richard Sieburth is a translator from French and German, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained recognition for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Sieburth is the editor of multiple volumes of Ezra Pound’s writings and translations.
Richard Sieburth is a translator from French and German, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained recognition for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Sieburth is the editor of multiple volumes of Ezra Pound’s writings and translations.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
