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Psyche Running by German poet Durs Grünbein, translated by Karen Leeder, and published by Kolkata’s Seagull Books, .

The judges said, “Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running is a brilliant overview and selection of a poet who satisfies our hunger to be serious, as again and again he finds himself ‘between words and things.’ Karen Leeder’s adept translations establish a new version of Grünbein in English: universal, lyrical, philosophical.”

Here are five poems from the collection:

Or poetry, what was that again? Seduction
by ancient feelings …. Voice-catcher, syllable-
magic, ars minor of the most elaborate finesse.
The chill of self-encounter, a dance
between all the stools. Not something half then,
nor something whole, yet marked by
that certain whiff of excess. For some a godless
prayer, for others the “true absolute real”.
That zigzag cicatrice – reason, bound up
with myth and affect – fresh scars,
marking the sleeping body
with sensitive spots.
The echoes return to the source, to the mouth,
where sounds are rounded to shape. Breath-image,
exhaled into the frosty air, into the dew-fresh nihil.
Led by a magic harness, Ariadne’s thread,
through the darkness of aporias, a chain
of happy moments stretching back
to the bathing girls by the Nile.
Most intimate line, one that cannot be plotted;
and has thus been escaping all geometry
since the world has been thought translatable
into formulae, into natural laws.
Forget this shameless I and its You,
longed into presence from afar. Verse
is a diver, scouring the depths,
searching for treasure on the seabed,
out there in the brain....