Meister's work is mesmerizingly succinct and elusive, but also ambitious to a degree almost unheard-of among presently-observed aesthetic moments. Highly recommended.--The Huffington Post
Foust and Frederick have done us all a great favor. Meister's poetry could have been lost in the rift of time that he wrote so elegantly about.--The Rumpus
A good, interesting collection, in a solid translation. . . . In Time's Rift is a welcome volume and certainly suggests that Meister is a significant poet deserving greater attention.--Complete Review
Wallless Space is a translation of German poet Ernst Meister's final collection and the last of the informal trilogy which also includes In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012) and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave, forthcoming 2015). Meister's poems are brief but dense, intense but playful; obsessed with mortality and the intersections of the everyday and the infinite.
There's nary a Maker,
there's nary a witness,
there's only Nature,
who brings herself
about herself, she alone--
and I'm
supposedly lonely
in her?
Ernst Meister (1911-79) was born in Hagen, Germany. He was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize.
Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver.
Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.
About the Author: Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany, and studied first theology, then literature, art history, and philosophy (the latter under Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer) at various German universities. After the publication of his first book in 1932, he published no poetry for two decades, a silent spell that ultimately gave way to the prolific last third of his life, over the course of which he produced more than sixteen volumes of verse as well as numerous other literary and visual works. Often compared to Paul Celan because of the brevity and difficulty of his poems, Meister tends toward a more abstract existentialism that renders his work both intensely emotional and inimitably strange. Having written outside the dominant literary circles of his time, he remains relatively unknown, though he was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, having been informed of the honor just days before his death. Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver. Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.
