Cover of Wind Sleeping in a Silk Tree
Tom Shulz

Wind Sleeping in a Silk Tree: Selected Poems 1993-2012

£12.00

Tom Schulz is one of the most thrilling poets to emerge from Germany after 1990. For all his impressive formal versatility, it‘s Schulz’s lyricism that‘s completely distinctive. Tender lyricism‘s struck through with lush, sensual imagery subverted by laconic, sometimes hilariously silly puns. Schulz’s voice is unique. Visceral immediacy is scored with conceptual jump-cuts.

It’s the fragmented, fragile voice of these poems that renders them documents – and creative glosses on – the alienation and desires so many experienced with that seismic shift from actually existing socialism to a capitalist realism Germany’s been beached with ever since.

Born and raised in East Germany, Schulz experienced this first-hand. But he’s not only a lightning-source of poetic enlightenment for those interested in biting social commentary on a dysfunctional Germany. Schulz has a gimlet eye for the beauties of nature and landscape around the world. And he‘s written some of the most elegant love poems in German of the last few decades.

ISBN: 978-1-915241-23-8 Categories: , Tag:

Praise and Poems

A melancholic modernist, a punchy parodist, a sceptical surrealist, a radical Romantic – Schulz is all these and many more. Having first published a few poems of his as long ago as 2001, Waterloo Press is delighted to finally present the first ever book-length translations of this key German poet.  ~ Simon Jenner

Spoken from the Towers

Warping the surface of the land and the country

I’ve seen roses
In Cracow, the dish light from the god factories
For me, it’s the polluted light
And no litter for the eyes, no
four pairs of hands to carry

Love remains without arrival

Sleep next to the angels
And what I believe is like a beautiful ship
Erase the ports from the world
Burn the maps that might provide information –
And what I say is that we live on the far
side of the moon

The sea cried you out of its eyes
And if you come as rain
-:
The paths in the water
Count the steps until full moon
Don’t count the hours
Across the piers, go

 

Translated by Gerald Fiebig

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