Klaus Merz - Böcker

Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise, condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of Bliss brings together three of Merz's critically acclaimed novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his work.Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness, eccentricity, and a child's death. In A Man's Fate, a moment of inattention on a mountainous hike upends a teacher's life and his understanding of mortality. And finally, The Argentine traces the fluctuations of memory and desire in a man's journey around the world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and intimate journey. Read as a whole, the works complement, enrich, and echo each other.

Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise, condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of Bliss brings together three of Merz’s critically acclaimed novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his work.Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness, eccentricity, and a child’s death. In A Man’s Fate, a moment of inattention on a mountainous hike upends a teacher’s life and his understanding of mortality. And finally, The Argentine traces the fluctuations of memory and desire in a man’s journey around the world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and intimate journey. Read as a whole, the works complement, enrich, and echo each other.

Merz is keenly attentive to daily life as a revelator of essentialtruths, and thus uses poetry as a way of returning closer to it; and“to unbecome what was.”  Merz' “nearing” and “distancing” processestake place inside us, through language. By summing up so gently andexactly (but also sometimes drolly or pointedly) the movement ofduality, Merz enables us to sense more fully, time and again, what itmeans to be alive: that “strange exhilaration within,” as he puts itin another of these splendid poems so vividly and resourcefullytranslated by Marc Vincenz.

This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016.This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016. Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.” This seminal volume brings together selections from Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).“Reading Merz' spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato's cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows.” –Nin Andrews“Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject as if from fragments. A strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality.” –Brian Swann“Merz’ world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. It’s no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of ‘less is more.’”—Lit Pub“An artisan of the understatement, a craftsman of finely-tuned precision.” –Neue Zuricher ZeitungKlaus 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, Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentine, Haymon, 2009) and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust (Aus dem Staub, Haymon, 2010), Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf, Haymon, 2013), What Helios Hauls (Helios Transport, Haymon 2016) and firm (firma, Haymon, 2019)Marc Vincenz is a poet, translator, fiction writer, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. His newest books are There Might Be a Moon or a Dog (Gazebo, Australia, 2022) and The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, forthcoming 2023).

Still Some Light in the House is the most recent poetry collection by Switzerland’s 2024 “Grand Prix Literatur” prize winner, Klaus Merz. Klaus Merz, a consummate master of the short form, captures the wonders and travails of aging in the alpine countryside reflected in these Taoist influenced poems and prose poems, which have been sculpted by the aging artist with every single word dutifully and carefully considered. Questions of mortality and the afterlife are considered and reflect in the forests, along the creeks and rivers, the mountains and in the blue sky stretching above.