Poetry and Time

Joachim Sartorius, Max Neumann

Translated by Alexander Booth

 

8.5 x 11 inches, 72 pp, 30 colour plates April 2019

ISBN : 9780857426550

Rs  799.00 (HB)
$30.00 (HB)
£21.99 (HB)

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For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann’s paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus Heaney, Fernando Pessoa and László Krasznahorkai, among many others.
 
In Poetry and Time, Neumann’s haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: 'They know what it is they do, but do not say it.' Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems’ reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius’s ruminations beautifully complement Neumann’s series of 30 poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.

Max Neumann lives and works in Berlin.

Joachim Sartorius directed the artists' programme for DAAD (German Academic-Exchange Programme) for eight years; served as general secretary of the Goethe Institut in Munich from 1996 to 2000; and later became the artistic director of Berliner Festspiele. Having been awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1992, he was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011. 

 

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who lives in Berlin.

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