Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.

Pages: 96

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Seagull Books

Release: December 11, 2020

ISBN: 0857427814

ISBN 13: 9780857427816

Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.

Pages: 96

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Seagull Books

Release: December 11, 2020

ISBN: 0857427814

ISBN 13: 9780857427816

More books from Karen Leeder

Thick of It

3.3/5 ( ratings)

I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other

3.7/5 ( ratings)

The Cambridge Companion to Rilke

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Last Day of the Year: Selected Poems

3.5/5 ( ratings)

In a Cabin, in the Woods (The German List)

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Who Was Ruth Berlau? / Wer War Ruth Berlau?

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Monsters Like Us

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Young Brecht

3.5/5 ( ratings)

O Chicago! O Widerspruch!: Hundert Gedichte auf Brecht

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Empedocles' Shoe

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?