Across the Land and the Water : Selected Poems 1964-2001

When W.G. Sebald died in 2001, he was internationally acknowledged as one of the most important German writers of our era. Now, thanks to Iain Galbraith's vibrant translations, the full breadth of his poetry is available in English for the first time. This volume brings together poems published during Sebald's lifetime with an additional selection of those which were found in his literary archives in Marbach and never published while he was alive. Arranged chronologically, from work published during his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he produced during the 1980s, the poems touch on the themes which were closest to Sebald - nature and history; forgetting and remembering; borders, journeys and landscapes - and express in short, lyrical form the same distinctive insight and sensitivity that shaped his great works of prose fiction.

W.G. Sebald is one of very few German writers of the last few decades to have attracted both a broad readership in the UK and an international following of journalists and scholars alike. He has proved a huge inspiration not just to younger writers but also to artists and photographers fascinated by the use of imagery and images in his work. His books include Austerlitz, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and After Nature. Iain Galbraith is a widely published translator of German into English. He won the John Dryden Prize for Literary Translation in 2004.