Psyche Running

A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Gruenbein's work over the past two decades.

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Gruenbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens-a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in-Gruenbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages.

In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Gruenbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Gruenbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease.