Art of Topiary
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€18.50
A dual-language collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.
The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals—acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time—into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations.
Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun. Yet for all Wagner’s wit and sharp poetic detail, The Art of Topiary is written with an intimate earnest: a swarm of gnats take on an urgent mystery as they hum in code around the speaker’s ears, a bird atop a rhino’s leathery back becomes a fragile porcelain cup, and the antlers of an elk reach for the air like a champion for a trophy.
Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.
Jan Wagner is the recipient of the 2017 Georg Büchner Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious honors in literature. He has published six collections of poems since 2001, as well as two collections of essays, several edited volumes, and a number of translations. For his poetry, which has been translated into more than thirty languages, Wagner has received fellowships from the German Academy, the Villa Massimo in Rome, the Villa Aurora, and elsewhere. His literary awards include the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Award for Poetry, and the Friedrich Hölderlin Award. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Wagner lives in Berlin. David Keplinger is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Another City. He has won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Book Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the DC, Danish, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.