Collected Poems

»Be uncomfortable; be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world« – this is perhaps the most famous line from the poems of Günter Eich, who was at the height of his fame in the 1950s and 60s and whose poems, alongside those of Gottfried Benn and Karl Krolow, were to many readers the epitome of what modern poetry could achieve after 1945. The motivations that had led people to commit the atrocities of the Third Reich had by no means perished with its end. Günter Eich tackled this survival with a new visual language, with ciphers, riddles and symbols for the uncanny, inexplicable aspects of human nature. His poems moved further and further in the direction of a witty, laconic pessimism, directed quiet persistence and dry mockery against the appropriating power of consumption, against senseless agreement and inane confidence – until finally, sometimes shrunk to one-liners and one-word poems, they stopped just short of silence.

On the occasion of the author’s 100th birthday in 2007, Suhrkamp Verlag presented a collected edition of Günter Eich’s poems from 1930 to 1972: these are texts for readers who do not want to see the spaces of the poetic blocked in a time of disillusionment and failed utopias.

»Eich’s acerbic, chafing, sensuous verses, dealing with life's most basic anxieties and activities, refute, through a combination of stubbornness and technique, Adorno's stricture about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz.« Amit Chaudhuri, Outlook India

»Of the three postwar writers whose work seems most clearly to answer to Adorno's sense that no poetry can be written after the Holocaust, it is Eich (Beckett and Celan are the others) whose refusal of rhetoric is most thorough, with the result that the speaker – the authorial presence – whoever it is who would have persuaded, blamed, or badgered us, seems to have vanished into thin air, leaving nothing to come between ourselves and the pure experience offered by the poems.« Belle Randall, Common Knowledge