632
BETTY FALKENBERG
the symbol. He is a master of small forms. His language is sparse, full of
biblical and classical references. With his growing skepticism, his poetry has
progressed to a more laconic style, less regular rhythms, and a renunciation of
rhyme.
It
is unfortunate that it was not possible
to
include poems from his
latest book which came out in 1972
(Gezfihlte Tage).
A poem like "Unter der
blanken Hacke des Mondes" has no equal in its stark denial of illusion.
Huchel is followed in the selection by
Johann~s
Bobrowski, who was born
14 years later, in 1917, and who died in 1965. Both poets have strong histori–
cal roots and great feeling for the land and its people. Their lines are taut,
their imagery precise. Many of Brobrowski's poems treat East European land–
scapes and cities, Jews and Gypsies, as a glance at titles alone indicates: "The
Latvian Autumn," "The Volga Towns," "Jakub Bart in Ralbitz." His use of
enjambement is often striking, as in the following lines though there is the
danger of seeming mannered when overdone:
...
But the tree
old, there is
a shore, mists with thin
bones move on the river.
In
the words of the poet Stefan Hermlin, "an endless, inexorable East wind
courses through these poems." Their rhythms are haunting, restless, and they
do not always come across in translation. The English is too smooth, too
refined. A word like "hinaufgehn" becomes "ascending"; inversions are put in
their proper order, and in the end the urgency, the mystery, is gone.
With Gunter Kunert we come to a new notion of poetry. We leave the
realm of the lyric form and enter a harsher world. Born in 1929, Kunert is a
direct descendant of Brecht. His poems are didactic, without metaphor.
Often they do not succeed at all as poems. Poetry-writing is a questionable
office and, in his own words, "to say the right thing is more than correctness."
His themes oscillate between the poles of political consciousness and the in–
ternal conflict of the individual, in particular, the individual as poet.
Reiner Kunze, whose poem "Dialectics" was the Object of attack at the 6th
Congress of the Writers' Union of the
DDR
in 1969, has been an outspoken
critic of the regime. "Dialectics" is a play on a Stalinist-colored history of the
Russian .communist Party. When Peter Huchel left the DDR, he wrote de–
ploring that:
The newspapers reported
no loss.
