Results by title

6 books match the query 'Mayröcker, Friederike'

cover of Cahier

Cahier

Friedericke Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2024

A collection of poetic stream-of-consciousness prose meditations by Friederike Mayröcker.
 
Friederike Mayröcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself—unless it’s writing. What counts, in her view, is only the poetry and “the echoic inventions” of a life that lasted for almost a century, which is preserved in her writings.
 
Widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mayröcker passed away in 2021 at the age of ninety-six. On the outside, her life may be subject to the impertinence of the finitude of all human existence. But on the inside, and in its transformation into the eternal moment, life only becomes richer and richer in forms of experience. In radically concentrated language and compellingly beautiful images, Mayröcker presents in this cahier a life that follows only one maxim: “Not just what is written, but existence, too, must be poetic.”
 
[more]
cover of Requiem for Ernst Jandl

Requiem for Ernst Jandl

Friederieke Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2018

A lyrical requiem for Mayröcker's late partner, the writer Ernst Jandl.

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and—with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief—reads Jandl’s works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
[more]
cover of as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window

as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window

Friederike Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2023

Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.
 
Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.
 
[more]
cover of fleurs

fleurs

Friederike Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2026

An uncompromising masterpiece that transforms memory and renewal into a wild world of words.

Fleurs—flowers, flower petals—a title that might suggest a gentle world of blooming fields and soft breezes. But in the hands of Friederike Mayröcker, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this is a book of a very different kind. It is a wild, vivid journey into a rich, elemental landscape.

If you follow Mayröcker’s path, you find not a comfortable meadow but steep, stony ground—a place where her inimitable voice rings out in all its power and purity. Unsentimental and crystal clear, Mayröcker’s writing is driven by a single purpose: to create images of remarkable vividness in a language as free, bold, and fresh as if it were newly invented.

The final installment of Mayröcker’s trilogy, following études and cahier, fleurs is a book of memory and renewal, protest and revelation—a testimony to the enduring magic of writing itself.
[more]
cover of just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now

just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now

Friederike Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2021

Poetic prose meditations written in a lyrical stream-of-consciousness style by renowned Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker.

It is summer in this book, even if nature often does not hold to summer. The flowers either have tiny buds or have long since withered. It is summer in the book, asserts Mayröcker’s work, because the summer light is switched on: sometimes blazingly bright, sometimes darkened with thunderclouds. At the same time, there is a magical light in this writing. In these stream-of-conscious prose poem meditations, Mayröcker formulates a poetics of simultaneity of all that is not: “not the scenes I remember, rather, it is the sensations accompanying those scenes.”
 
Strictly composed in form and language while luxuriantly proliferated in daydreams and nightmares, just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now is a significant volume in the radical late work of the great Viennese poet.
[more]
cover of études

études

Friederike Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2019

A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria’s best-known contemporary voices.

Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker’s almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker’s case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation.
 
The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transforms the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which “opens everything up.” Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor’s visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody.
 
Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker’s distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.
[more]