 |  | Ror Wolf – | In a State of Expanded Calm | | (Collected Poems) |
poetry, new title
Edited by Friedmar Apel
480pp
A composed tone dominates Ror Wolf’s poems, although they deal with curious events, accidents and erotic confusions. Parts of bodies protrude into rooms, pistols are drawn and travellers fade away mutely into unknown territories. The lightness of the language and its artful comedy are only two aspects of this world, behind whose description the sceptical gaze of the melancholic is always in evidence.
With the inclusion of unpublished early poems this is the first one-volume collection to bring together all of Ror Wolf’s poetry.
»In his prose, his poetry and his word and sound collages Ror Wolf inimitably combines linguistic artistry and grotesque comedy with a terse and compassionate perception of reality and its fundamental constants, fear and hope, pleasure and decay. He is a master of the cryptic and utopian play with the primal matter of poetry.«
Friedrich Hölderlin Award, Jury statement
»What would the world be without Ror Wolf (…) Wolf’s worlds are often as unsettling as those collages Max Ernst assembled from elements at once familiar, arbitrary and terrifying. That not only applies to Wolf’s own collages which resemble them, and which he has been producing for a long time as a relaxation from writing, but also to his texts. Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining…«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
The Collected Works of Ror Wolf. The New Edition for the New Century
The annotated edition of Ror Wolf not only brings together all previously published books by Ror Wolf, but also work which appeared in out-of-the-way places or was not printed at all. It includes early drafts as well as manuscript versions and for the first time makes accessible a broad selection of essays, reviews, speeches and correspondence. An afterword by the editor describes the genesis and reception of the individual works.
Reviews
»Pure joy. (...) There’s no explanation yet as to why this mixture of ›excitement and scare, lust for realism, importance and concision‹, of eloquence, humour and horror moves and exhilarates readers like it does, what makes for its strong pull. An enigmatic work, yet suitbale for daily use.«
Frankfurter Rundschau (launch of the Collected Works)
»In over forty years, Ror Wolf has created an opus that is singular in its powerful visual intricateness, its wild, chilly humour, and its magical simulation of reality. He is a classic of postmodern literature, he has been for quite a while.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung
About the author
Friedmar Apel, born 1948, teaches literature at the University of Bielefeld. He is co-editor of the major edition of Goethe’s work (Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche) and writes regular reviews for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His literary debut, DAS BUCH FRITZE, appeared in 2003; in 2009 he published NANETTES GEDÄCHTNIS. He lives in Bielefeld.
Ror Wolf, born in 1932, is, besides Thomas Bernhard and Arno Schmidt, one of the most idiosyncratic and prominent authors of German Literature after 1945. He is also a master of fine arts. Since the early Sixties he creates surrealistic collages. His radio dramas count among the most successful of German radio plays. Ror Wolf has received numerous awards, most recently the Friedrich Hölderlin Award in recognition of his contribution to German language and literature.
More about the life and work of Ror Wolf: www.wirklichkeitsfabrik.de
More titles by Ror Wolf
|
