Thirsty for More Sebald

At The New Yorker’s book blog, Teju Cole offers a solid review of the new book of Sebald’s selected poetry, Across the Land and the Water.

He had a feeling for the inanimate, too, for ruins and comminuted landscapes, places that have been reduced to their smallest units by the forces of nature and history. He is, in many of these poems, an adept of what Nabokov calls, in “Transparent Things,” “the dream life of debris.” And he understood especially well the private life of objects. As he wrote in an essay in “Unrecounted”: “Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.” Everywhere in “Across the Land and the Water” is a vigilance about the world of things. Greenhouses are “home-made crystal palaces,” a power station is “a sick elephant / still just breathing / through its trunk,” someone’s “pigskin suitcase gapes,” and the poem entitled “Room 645” describes, with deadpan humor, and with all the seriousness of an assistant janitor going through an inventory, the various objects in a garish hotel room in Hanover.

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