Olaf neopan Schwanke

Fifteen years after his last poetry collection, the Siegen painter-poet Olaf Neopan Schwanke once again opens the gates to his Arcadia. There, life is still vibrant and colorful: people and mythical beings like fauns and harpies populate the parks and cafés, curiously eyeing each other with suspicion, strolling, sauntering, and traveling, indulging and surrendering to one another. In between, Neopan acts as a participant observer, sometimes a conductor, sometimes a connoisseur, but always a lustful-poetic shape-shifter. The Berlin-based writer Friedrich Kröhnke writes about him: "More than with his wonderful paintings, I delight in Neopan's poems for certain recognizable lines of tradition within them. Olaf Neopan Schwanke is akin to Erich Kästner, like Mascha Kaléko in our present day. The seemingly light nature of these texts, the bohemian spirit and flânerie within them, the city, the café, melancholy, and an indelible joy in so much, in the seasons, simply in life... In the wit of language, in the observation of the world, but especially as an eroticist, Schwanke, Neopan, is at times even more filled with verses than Kaléko, better than Kästner.".