Shadow Lands: Selected Poems

by Johannes Bobrowski

Book Overview

A collection of poems focusing on Sarmatia, an ancient name for a part of Eastern Europe near Russia, dealing with the guilty spirits of this place that the author loved as a child, and helped destroy as part of the Nazi army.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811212769
• ISBN13: 9780811212762
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Too good to be consigned to obscurity

Bobrowski is a poet sadly in need of rehabilitation. Like many post World War II German poets, he wrote about the guilt and sense of loss that came with the war and the Holocaust. His perspective is unique though. As an East Prussian he witnessed the destruction that region's rich multi-ethnic culture of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews at the hands of both the Germans and Soviets. Bobrowski's work as evocation of that lost world, and his connection with it is intense yet ambiguous. Myths and distant history mix with everyday events. Dead languages are resurrected. Nature's cruelty is described without romanticism. Bobrowski's focus is narrow, but he manages to make the history and nature of the Baltic stand in for the beauty and loss that everyone experiences.