Across the Land and the Water

A publishing landmark-the first majorcollection of poems by one of the late twentieth century's literary masters

German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz,the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that TheGuardian called "a new literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir, parttravelogue." Its publication put Sebald in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, andBorges. Yet Sebald's brilliance as a poet has been largely unacknowledged-untilnow.

Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, the nearly one hundred poems in Acrossthe Land and the Water range from those Sebald wrote as a student in thesixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. Featuringeighty-eight poems published in English for the first time and thirty-threefrom unpublished manuscripts, this collection also brings together all theverse he placed in books and journals during his lifetime.

Here are Sebald's trademark themes-from nature and history ("Events of warwithin/a life cracks/across the Order of the World/spreading from Cassiopeia/adiffuse pain reaching into/the upturned leaves on the trees"), to wandering andwondering ("I have even begun/to speak in foreign tongues/roaming like a nomadin my own/town . . ."), to oblivion and memory ("If you knew every cranny/of myheart/you would yet be ignorant/of the pain my happy/memories bring").

Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to hissuperb body of work, and this unique collection is bound to become a classic inits own right.

W. G. Sebaldwas born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language andliterature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at theUniversity of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becomingprofessor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the firstdirector of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previouslytranslated books-The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo,and Austerlitz-have won a number of international awards, including theNational Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award,the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December2001.