Rolf Bossert
I stand on the Stairway of Winds

Collected poems.
fiction

SELF PORTRAIT
I write my life
here, write my life away.

They were dramatic circumstances under which the poet Rolf Bossert entered the German literary stage in December 1985 and left it again only a short time later: Counting among the circle of Romanian-German writers around Herta Müller, Franz Hodjak and Richard Wagner, he came into increasingly violent conflict with the Romanian regime in the early 1980s. In 1984, he applied to leave the country, which, after political censorship, resulted in his being banned from publishing. In December 1985, he was finally able to leave the country for Frankfurt am Main, where he took his own life only two months later.

Rolf Bossert's poems reflect the difficult circumstances of his biography: they are radical, ironic as well as self-ironic, sarcastic, austere, of merciless beauty. But always sharply observed and of impressive force: »In Bossert's poems, the images only really stand when they are overturned. He drives through the order of language until the shards sparkle. In this sparkle, fear and desire sit together.« Herta Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
I stand on the Stairway of Winds shows for the first time in great completeness Rolf Bossert's lyrical work, which is still to be discovered in its irrepressibility.

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Romania - Tracus Arte Publishing House

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Reviews

»Even today, the many-faceted nature of Bossert's work is astonishing. (...) Bossert deserves to be read again.«
Harald Hartung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Bossert was a master of black humour."
Richard Wagner, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"With Rolf Bossert one can learn that both can be true: the feeling of despair and the game, even the trade with it."
Meike Fessmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Anyone reading these poems now from the distance of more than twenty years is always impressed."
Holger Schlodder, NDR

"For rediscovery: this new edition now makes the astonishing leaps in development and metamorphoses of the poet Bossert tangible."
Michael Braun, Freitag

"Bossert's poems move in a field of tension whose extreme and highly contrasting poles could be identified as Brecht and Celan."
Jan Wagner, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Bossert's Collected Poems give a breathless impression of the uncompromisingness of a word-filtering man."
Marica Bodrozic, Hessischer Rundfunk