Pitch & Glint

‘Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan , jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.’ Michael Hofmann

‘Pitch & Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.’ Michael Krüger

‘Epoch-making.’ Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

‘Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.’ Ursula Krechel,* Der Tagesspiegel*

‘Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.’ Helmut Böttiger, Frankfurter Rundschau

‘Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.’ Lothar Müller, *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *

‘Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch & Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.’ Martin Ahrends, Die Zeit

‘Seiler has masterful command of a subtle style, both skittish & firm in its diction and movement, tense and tensile in its branching extensions and jittery vertiginous drops. One could call it elliptical, but it’s more a kind of binocular vision, with one lens ground for cosmic focus and the other for a microscope. The voicing of such vision shifts from ecstatic to abject; the idiom is constantly sliding, smearing, merging to connect phenomena and feeling in work that opens a new approach in the ecological awareness currently driving poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century, tuning the dial of the poetic to its lower frequencies, where the signal can pass through walls.’ Joshua Weiner, Poetry magazine

‘Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century.’ Joshua Weiner, Poetry

‘A seminal work of German verse translated into radiant English for the first time. Like the uranium that underlaid Seiler's childhood, Pitch & Glint burns with an unstable power.’ Jack Barron, The Arts Desk

‘The Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious prize in German literature, has been awarded to a magician of poetic language. A true conjuror, he has rightly joined the company of his great countryman Wolfgang Hilbig, that other bulwark of German poetry and prose.’ Evelyn Schlag, PN Review

‘Lutz Seiler’s Pitch & Glint … uses broken and glitchy language to reflect the fractures of East German history… These poems, and their English translation by Stefan Tobler, are a rare achievement.’ Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Best poetry books of 2023

‘Served by a trio of stellar translators, And Other Stories has done a great service bringing these three works into English. They will allow a new audience to enter Lutz Seiler’s haunted world and admire his singular voice in its different refractions.’ Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

‘This is a new kind of eco-poetry, born out of the last days of the GDR, with broken syntax, truncated rhythms, odd juxtapositions, neologisms, ampersands and a rejection of standard capitalization.’ Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

‘Meticulously translated from German, these poems create an inimitable sound world where everything is muted as if beneath a blanket of snow, whispering, sizzling, crackling.’ Philip Terry, The Guardian

‘Versions that follow Seiler’s abrupt musicality and strange noun-ishness, while retaining their own internal, sonic sense.’ Alexander Wells, POETRY magazine

-- Alexander Wells * POETRY magazi