Wickerwork

Vivifying poetry of nature and the spirit — explore a mystical world of hawkmoths and elvers, skylarks and salamanders, with the shimmering grace of Gary Snyder

Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.

Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”

With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.