Still Some Light in the House

Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Holderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust, Unexpected Development, Helios Hauls and firm.Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, journalist, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation; his translation of Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue: Selected Poems, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature.

“Marc Vincenz lucid translations make Klaus Merz’ varied and vivid poems delightful, incisive responses to the world and life imagined in startling images that upend our ways of seeing: he provides a visual glossary of the poetry of everyday life. Whether in his minimalist, haiku-like poems or the prose poems or longer verse poems, his language is seamless and draws us in.“—Maxine Chernoff“Merz is like a diamond cutter—he writes of the inevitable and ineffable with incisive, shimmering clarity.”—Nin Andrews“A master of the precise apercu, of distillation and insinuation: a poet who carefully weighs each and every word, color and tone. An autumn wind wafts through these poems. There is talk of departure, death and impermanence; but also, time, and time again, of the beauty of an endangered world. Klaus Merz dares—without wavering, but with a tender meticulousness—to do something that has been the task of all poets for millennia …”—Neue Züricher Zeiting“Subtle milestones define Klaus Merz’ poems; no blaring voices, rather the reverberations between the lines, carried on by this gentle melancholy: sketches from plain life; close encounters between ordinary people … observations and minutia from encounters and journeys; then suddenly this metaphysical commentary on one’s lot and life … In these poems you will encounter moods and atmospheres that all of use have stumbled upon at some point; yet here, they are sealed in by most ingenious words and retain all their worth.”—Literatur&Kunst (a magazine of literature + art)