"Fish Magic" introduces the fascinating and individual West German poet Elisabeth Borchers, whose poetry has attracted critical acclaim since its first appearance in 1961. Her poems have the elusive and haunting quality of magic charms. As in the art of Paul Klee, whose painting gives this book its title, there is a deceptively childlike surface masking a tragic awareness of the human condition. Echoes of fairy tales, folk song and nursery rhymes mingle with nightmarish moments in these sharp, compelling and original poems.

Fish Magic: Selected Poems (German and English Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Elisabeth Borchers

Anneliese Wagner

Poetry

Learning Links

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fascinating era of German poetry, to which it forms a uniquely personal introduction. Matthew Mead once wrote: Of the Germans, Gottfried Benn has said many things to their end, but the important poem by a contemporary is, for me, Sabais’s Generation.’ This poem confronts Germany’s post-war experience in a way no other German writer has matched. Together with the mysterious, almost spell-like poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, it is one of the highlights of this varied collection, which ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, the witty and sardonic to the surrealist, and the elegiac in Nelly Sachs, a Nobel Prizewinner. Ruth and Matthew Mead’s selections from Sabais, The People and the Stones (1983) and Bobrowski, Shadow Lands (1984) are also published by Anvil, as is Matthew Mead’s selected poems The Autumn-Born in Autumn (2008). Born in England in 1924, Matthew Mead lived in Germany from 1962 until his death in 2009.

Word for Word: Selected Translations from German Poets

Johannes Bobrowski

H.C. Artmann

Wolfgang Bächler

Horst Bienek

Günter Bruno Fuchs

Christian Geissler

Max Hölzer

Urs Oberlin

Anvil Press Poetry

Das Weihnachtsbuch: Mit alten u. neuen Geschichten, Gedichten u. Leidern (Insel Taschenbuch; 46) (German Edition)

Insel-Verlag

Marchen Deutscher Dichter

Wassilissa die Wunderschone. Und andere russische Marchen

Alles redet, schweigt und ruft

Suhrkamp

Eine Geschichte Auf Erden: Gedichte

Suhrkamp Publishers

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Books by Elisabeth Borchers