MORTAL DIAMOND: Poems
(Translated by Michael Eskin)
(January 2013)

“... a book ... which on any given page will challenge the intellect as much as the aesthetic of verse ... Durs Grünbein has conspired with the sea floor of humanity and the stars of the divine ... to find a center of what poetry is: earthly and spiritual.” --WORLD LITERATURE TODAY


Available as an eBook at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, Blio, Diesel and other fine eBook retailers.


ISBN 978-0-935830-07-8 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-1-935830-18-4 (eBook)

In this new collection of poems—his most philosophically probing and poetically revealing to date—Durs Grünbein takes us on a spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul and its manifold embodiments across the ages. Addressing us in his own voice as well as through the prisms of Seneca, Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Malebranche, Vermeer, and others, Grünbein subtly and lovingly traces the paradoxes of creatureliness—its joys and sufferings, its resilience and fragility—to remind us of the “mortal diamond from the hands of nature” that is life.

REVIEWS

“... a book ... which on any given page will challenge the intellect as much as the aesthetic of verse ... Durs Grünbein has conspired with the sea floor of humanity and the stars of the divine ... to find a center of what poetry is: earthly and spiritual.”

World Literature Today


“... unpredictably imaginative and psychologically penetrating.”
The New Republic


“... one of the leading figures of contemporary European poetry ...”
Don Paterson


“... a truly cosmopolitan poet ... He transcends the narrow confines of his particular ‘place in the universe’ ...”
The Times Literary Supplement




Translated by Michael Eskin
ISBN 978-0-935830-07-8 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-1-935830-18-4 (eBook)
Publication Date: January 2013


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One of the world's greatest living poets and essayists, Dresden-born Durs Grünbein has had been the recipient of many national and international awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize (Germany’s most prestigious literary recognition) (1994), the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize (2004), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2005), the Berlin Literature Prize (2006), the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). His book Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (translated by Michael Hofmann) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2006. He has also been a Fellow at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and the Villa Massimo in Rome, Italy. In 2009, he was awarded the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts as well as the Great Cross of Merit with Star by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since 1988, when the then twenty-five-year-old’s first collection of poems, Grauzone, morgens (Gray zone, morning), appeared—a mordantly poignant poetic reckoning with life in the former East Germany—Durs Grünbein has published more than twenty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages. He holds the Chair for Poetics and Artistic Aesthetics at the School of the Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany, and lives in Berlin, Germany.


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