Book description
Across the Land and the Water is a stunningly beautiful
selection of poetry by W. G. Sebald.
Across the Land and the Water brings together poems from
throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after
his death. Arranged chronologically, from his student days in the
1960s to the longer narratives he worked on in the 1980s, these poems
are suffused by the themes which dominated Sebald's books. Here you
will find subtle vignettes on nature and history, death and memory,
journeys and landscapes, each short piece filled with insight,
sensitivity and brilliance.
'An important book . . . full of things that are beautiful and
fascinating' Andrew Motion, Guardian
'When you read Sebald you are transported to another realm. Reading
him is a truly sublime experience' Literary Review
'Gracefully unsettling. The poems invest every landscape with an
archaeologist's sense of the pain, toil and loss secreted in each
layer of soil' Independent
'One of the most important writers of our time' A. S. Byatt
'Delightful' Economist
'Show a humane and complex intelligence and deserve a place next to
Sebald's prose output' New Statesman
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allg u, Germany, in 1944 and
died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in
Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as
an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled
permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European
Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of
The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo,
Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of
Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in
the Country.
W. G. Sebald is one of very few German writers of the last few
decades to have attracted both a broad readership in the UK and an
international following of journalists and scholars alike. He has
proved a huge inspiration not just to younger writers but also to
artists and photographers fascinated by the use of imagery and images
in his work. His books include Austerlitz, The
Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and After Nature.
Iain Galbraith is a widely published translator of German into
English. He won the John Dryden Prize for Literary Translation in 2004.
