Book Synopsis In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seilers non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing essays that are different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seilers anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium. Other essays focus on poetry, including his awakening to it while waiting in an army truck on his military service, and there are pieces on German poets such as Ernst Meister, Jrgen Becker and Peter Huchel. The title essay describes the poet Huchels notebook, a kind of dictionary of images organised by mood and location. Providing a perfect entry to Seilers work, In Case of Loss sees one of Europes most original writers speak with openness and insight in essays full of a poets attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives. Review Quotes We see the fascination of the factual, but also the struggle to find a voice and shape the urgent material of reality. Many of the essays turn on origins and how to narrate history, venturing back to childhood, conscription, early poems, places of personal significance and some of the authors great literary predecessors and mentors, including Peter Huchel, Jrgen Becker and Ernst Meister. --Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement If this book were a building, it would surely be a makeshift shack of some kind. A shelter for forgotten objects but also a workshop in which wheels are allowed to turn without always having to touch the ground. The views from the window keep changing. No sooner have you glimpsed old tank roads running past dunes in Fischland by the Baltic, than youre somehow looking out from a hotel room in Los Angeles, or gazing over a lawn, which at first lies outside a proscribed poets house in a remote forest, and is then transported to a cultural centre in Rome. Theres a village too, still in the GDR, where everyone is tired thanks to the Cold War decision to convert it into a vast uranium mine. This is an exceptional and absorbing book, in which Lutz Seiler successfully recovers and also recreates the narrative of our times. --Patrick Wright It is never about reconstructing. Memory does not bring back what was forgotten. Indeed, the person who remembers doesnt even know for sure that what is remembered ever existed. . . Seilers inimitable style as a storyteller, the wilful waywardness and weight of what he has to say, the intensity (and personal tact) of his engagement with the landscapes of others poetries and lives all make these essays a lively portrait of the writer surrounded by his library. Seiler sets standards for reflection in art today. At the same time, he gives us a sense of the pagan-sacramental importance of objects in poetry. --Sibylle Cramer, Sddeutsche Zeitung Praise for Lutz Seiler Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century. --Joshua Weiner, POETRY magazine Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR. --Michael Hofmann, TLS , International Books of the Year Seilers poems are immersive, unpredictable journeys into a past that is both irrecoverably lost and hauntingly present. They are at once soundscapes and dream-narratives, their language propulsive and furious and broken. --Patrick McGuinness Recording this music requires such fluid syntax, allowing sentences to slip over and under each other to make new meanings. The force of this music [in Pitch & Glint ] made me reconsider the values of the broad field of ecological poetry. --Harry Josephine Giles, Poetry Book Societys Translation Choice selector Lutz Seiler began as a bricklayer and ended up building poems. Why I started to read and write, I have no idea, he says, but we should be glad. Pitch & Glint created a storm when it was published in its original German. Finally these poems are translated into English by Stefan Tobler. --Chris McCabe, Librarian of the National Poetry Library, UK The Georg Bchner Prize, the most prestigious prize in German literature, has been awarded to a magician of poetic language. [...] A true conjuror, he has rightly joined the company of his great countryman Wolfgang Hilbig, that other bulwark of German poetry and prose. --Evelyn Schlag, PN Review A seminal work of German verse translated into radiant English for the first time [...] Like the uranium that underlaid Seilers childhood, Pitch & Glint burns with an unstable power. --Jack Barron, The Arts Desk About the Author Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. For the body of his work, he was awarded the 2023 Georg Bchner Prize, whose past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Martyn Crucefix has published six full collections of poetry. His translation of Rilkes Duino Elegies was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, while These Numbered Days, translations of poems by Peter Huchel, won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His new collection Between A Drowning Man was published in 2023.