Falten und Fallen

"Shivering under the masks of knowledge, / Disturbed by the unheard, / Dreamless in the day under cynical clocks, ..." - the new poems by the thirty-one-year-old lyricist Durs Grünbein testify in a radicalised way to painfully disillusioned consciousness and an unsparing view of the anatomy of our time and its people. In his first book of poetry, Grauzone morgens, Durs Grünbein, who comes from Dresden, already took stock of his generation's attitude to life in the socialist ghetto.Durs Grünbein's second book Schädelbasislektion looked back unsentimentally at the disintegration of the GDR and dissected the space between brain and skullcap in powerful, perceptually sharp cycles of poems to diagnose ego and language sarcastically: "Was Du bist steht am Rand / anatomischer Tafeln. "Written between 1991 and 1994, Durs Grünbein's third collection of poems - Falten und Fallen - shows the continuation of a poetic concept.Starting from precise observations of everyday life, at the place where the banal and the symbolic intersect, and on the traces of injury and desire, this analytical lyricism seeks to explore the connection between language and the physical: "Think from the edges of wounds, from the veto / Of viscera, from the silence / Of cranial sutures. The rising of the moons / Above the nail beds leads / Other heavens up, more strictly starry. "The poem, wrote Durs Grünbein, "ideally presents thinking in a sequence of physiological short circuits. Every discharge is immediately followed by a build-up of tension and vice versa. The energy for this is supplied by a complex that is actually only inadequately described by >Body.