Now back in print, the poems of Georg Trakl have been championed by Rilke, Bly, Wright, and Wittgenstein.

A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg Trakl In Georg Trakl's brief, tragic life he produced a body of work of intense visual power. Dense, imagistic and full of unnerving symbolism, his poems occupy a critical place in German Expressionism. Until his death on the Eastern Front in 1914, Trakl honed a singular poetic voice to express the horror he saw in the world around him, culminating in the starkly powerful war poems for which he is best known. This edition includes all of Trakl's major poems alongside a judicious selection of the best of his uncollected work, all rendered in vividly clear English by translator and poet Will Stone. With a biography, a critical introduction and a chronology of Trakl's life, this collection promises to reinvigorate interest in this under-appreciated poet.

Franz Fühmann's magnum opus. At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions--Nazism, then socialism--and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.

Like much German-language poetry of the years preceding the First World War, the poems of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) are imbued with a sense of historical crisis, but what sets his work apart is the mildness and restraint of his images of universal disintegration. Trakl typically couched his vision of the end of days in images of migrating birds, abandoned houses, and closing eyelids, making his poetry at once apocalyptic, rustic, and intimate. The argument made in this study is that this vision amounts to a unitary worldview with tightly interwoven affective, ethical, social, historical, and cosmological dimensions. Often termed hermetic and obscure, Trakl's poems become more accessible when viewed in relation to the evolution of his methods and concerns across different phases, and the idiosyncrasies of his strangely beautiful later works make sense as elements of a sophisticated system of expression committed to "truth" as a transcendental order. Through close readings of poems covering the span of his lyric output, this study traces the evolution of Trakl's distinctive style and themes while attending closely to biographical and cultural contexts. Richard Millington is Senior Lecturer in German at Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand). He is the author of Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets (2012).

The chaotic mixture of elements in Trakl's poems is more apparent than real, this book argues, thus challenging the "Orphic" view of Walther Killy and his followers. A dream of unity—one of the most ancient dreams in human history—is in fact reflected in all of Trakl's work. The recurring themes in Trakl's poetry are brought into focus through Dr. Detsch's literary, psychological, and philosophical analysis: the union of male and female in incest from the Jungian standpoint, the union of life and death from the Heideggerian standpoint and that of German Romanticism as represented by Novalis, the union of good and evil from the Dostoyevskian or Nietzschean standpoint, the mixture of images from the Goethean definition of symbolism. Trakl (1887–1914) is presented as a poet whose lyric voice sounded a cry of hope in its deepest despair. As Dr. Detsch's generous quotations from the poet's work (in the original German) make clear, Georg Trakl sought poetic expression for a union of opposites.

Sebastian Dreaming comprises the second book in James Reidel's Our Trakl series. Published posthumously in the original German in 1915, this is the second and last collection prepared by Trakl himself. Indeed, the Austrian poet may have tied his own fate to it. During his last days in a military hospital, Trakl had politely requested proofs of Sebastian Dreaming from his publisher and waited a week before overdosing on cocaine. He had been told once before that the war, which drove him into madness, had indefinitely postponed his masterpiece. Now the wait is over for Trakl's book to appear separately and in English. Until now translations of the poems from this collection have appeared in selections and complete volumes. Reidel has chosen to present the book individually, as Trakl wanted his book experienced. To achieve this, a certain verisimilitude in these English renderings has been achieved--even omitting the German facing texts is at work here--for which the translator has gone to great lengths, with an eye for seeing Trakl in his time and place, not only as an early modern poet but one whose strange and intriguing language and setting came from another century and still haunt us in ours.