spuytenduyvil

Eros and Thanatos. Love and Death. The majestic themes of life and literature that characterize Jürg Amann’s entire body of work are delicately woven together in Lifelong Bird Migration, his last collection of poems to be published. The poems are accompanied with the searing question of “how she was intended, our World where love subsides, and … if she is intended at all.” Precise, masterful but searingly lucid, these poems talk of love in the inevitable vision of a final departure and of a yearning of faith lost. Compiled by the poet himself before his untimely death in 2013 and faithfully brought to life in English by award-winning translator, Marc Vincenz, Lifelong Bird Migration brings together the quintessence of Amann’s small yet influential oeuvre of verse.

 

 

[Jürg Amann] condenses his narrative impulse with a fury of precisely controlled tone, evocatively painting with words and language. These lines become a rhythmic and melodic chant, pulsating across great breadths, catalyzing in a sharp staccato.

      Neue Züricher Zeitung (Switzerland)

 

These travels are a farewell tour whereby the stelae of memory are resurrected once more lest they disappear from the inner vision … Jürg Amann, the tender, slow-moving, subtle poet, who in this love story, sends his figure on such a long journey back to his lover—until they no longer know anything about each other—once again, holds firm to his path with a slow determination, with precision and enviable subtlety.

      Lesen in Tirol (Austria)

 

Precise to a hair, compressed, compact and polished, these poems go great distances with very few words.

      ekz bibliotheksservice (Germany)

 

[In Lifelong Bird Migration, Jürg] Amann’s dream-poem has become a night-serenade … hymnal in tone, seductive, auspicious, and immutable—at times forcefully direct, at times a meditative eulogy to his lost love.

      Tagblatt (Switzerland)