Skip to main content

Distributed for Seagull Books

Seasonal Time Change

Selected Poems

Our twice-yearly daylight savings holiday, in which we faithfully, collectively adjust our clocks, is purely human tampering with the calendar. Yet, it is a practice that is embedded in nature’s principles, even as we exact more sunlight for ourselves in an over-organized, technological world. Mirroring this dichotomy, Michael Krüger brings us The Seasonal Time Change, a collection of poems where an exacting eye is cast on nature. The poet’s perspective is observant, stringent, and very human, bringing both intellect and emotion to the page. Translated by Joseph Given, the verses are in turn scrutinizing, wistful of the brutality of nature, and rejoicing in the simple wonder of life.

​Bearing witness to Krüger’s interactions with renowned poets and artists through his time as director of Hanser publishing house, proximity and relationships are ongoing themes in this volume. Together, the poems remind us of our own mortality and of the finiteness of nature, but also our need for celebration even—perhaps especially—in times of darkness.

128 pages | 5 x 8 1/2 | © 2015

The Seagull Library of German Literature

Poetry


Seagull Books image

View all books from Seagull Books

Reviews

Seasonal Time Change: Selected Poems, Kruger’s latest book to be translated and published in English, presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger’s poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet’s world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature’s unsentimental image.”

Rain Taxi

Table of Contents

I.
   My Desk in Allmanshausen    
   Not a Haiku    
   Postcard, May 2012   
   Three Winds, Pentecost    
   May    
   Near Münsing    
    Long Conversation    
   Crow-Eater    
    I Cannot Divine What it Meaneth    
    Wooden House    
    Happiness    
    Walk in the Woods    
    A Friend  
    Twilight    
    The Last Day of August    
    The Death of the Birch, 2011   
    Old Man under an Apple Tree    
    Nights on the Terrace    
    Photo Album    
    Memory from School    
    Class Reunion    
    Poem    
    Peripheral Symptoms of War    

II.      
    In the Negev    
    Hotel Malibran, Venice    
    Hotel Near Erfurt    
    Message, 2012  
    Hotel Europa    
    Enlightenment    
    Flight to Istanbul    
    Harry Mulisch    
    Hotel Il Patriarca    
    Shame    
    After the Rain    
    Before the Storm    
    Street Scene in a Foreign City    
    Russian Cash    
    Four Lines for Lalla    
    Cinnamon    
    On Seagulls    
    Countryside Cafe    
    National Museum in Calcutta    
    India—Seven Postcards    
    Programme Poetry    
    The Hedgehog    
    How Poems Happen    
    Sleepless    
    Copyright  

III.      
    Old Wooden House    
    A Poet    
    (Untitled)    
    In the Uckermark    
    Lentils in New York    
    Almost Nothing    
    Lost Time    
    Written from the Heart    
    Istanbul Revisited    
    Old Well    
    Diel    
    Walking, Slightly Moved    
    Czeslaw, Milosz    
    Translating    
    Outdated    
    What Still Has to be Done!    
    Antonio Tabucchi is Dead    
    Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin    
    Nicolas Born    
    Claude Simon    
    A Reminder    
    Whodunnit?    
    A Mirror    
    Tidying Up    
    In the Shed  

IV.      
    Snow    
    New Year, 2012
    New Year    
    Winter    
    Wretched Apples in February    
    Snow Dreamer    
    Dreamings    
    Palm Sunday, 2012    
    Seedlings    
    Beach Cafe    
    Short Trip    
    Summerhouse at Easter    
    The Current State of Affairs, 2012   
    At the Lake    
    Near Boston, at the Sea    
    Expecting Rain    
    Autumn    
    At the Baltic Sea, Very Early    
    Chiusi, Terre di Siena    
    The Spider and I    
    The Blackbird    
    Early Sun in the South    
    Cutting Grass    
    End of the Summer    
    Reverie    
    Still Pool    
    Clearing  

Notes    
 
 

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press