Borrowed Sceneries

»Borrowed sceneries« are a traditional stylistic element in East Asian garden art. A scenery beyond the gardens, often a mountian or an imposing building, is deliberately included in the composition. A small space thus opens towards the vastness and increases its spendour. These poems use the very same method.

A garden is always designed as a paradisaic scenery. Every city park can be read as a landscape of the hereafter, every public green space can be examined in regard to its utopian potential. Marion Poschmann borrows a lunapark in the USA or a piece of Finland’s taiga and traces the spiritual longings and political implications that are expressed in these landscapes. Her poems reflect – some in the adaptation of traditional forms like the didactic poem or the Japanese Noh play – how each landscape appears as an aesthetic construct and they celebrate the creative power of language and of nature.

»Amidts the wealth of allusions and intuitions, the ease is surprising.« Tobias Lehmkuhl, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»[Marion Poschmann] transports her readers into a a state of limbo in which we form the orbit of her fame as happy balls of luminescent paper.« Patrick Bahners, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Just like her essays, Marion Poschmann’s poems in Borrowed Sceneries show thinking in its most beautiful form« Hubert Winkels, DIE ZEIT

»Marion Poschmann’s poems […] develop an art of perception that sets new standards in 21st century poetry.« Michael Braun, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»You read, pause, read forwards and backwards, lose your bearings and have gained the world: that’s the nature of Marion Poschmann’s texts!« Dirk Hohnsträter, WDR

»No doubt about it: Marion Poschmann belongs among the most important talents of contemporary German poetry. May her book have many readers.« Eberhard Geisler, taz. die tageszeitung

»The more intensively you occupy yourself with them, the more discoveries there are to be made« Ulrike Sárkány, NDR

»full of intellectual gains and playful experiments. In addition, there is the artful handling of verse forms.« Astrid Kaminski, Berliner Zeitung