A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations (The German List)

by HansMagnusEnzensberger (Author), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2018

  $16.72

  In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking--a pair of scissors, perhaps--is both a small, human victory and a quiet reminder of our own ephemeral nature. He sets his quotidian reflections against a broad historical and political backdrop: the cold war and its accompanying atomic threat; the German student revolt; would-be socialism in Cuba, China, and Africa; and World War II as experienced by the youthful poet.

  Enzensberger's poems are conversational, skeptical, and serene; they culminate in the extended set of observations that gives the collection its title. Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, are for Enzensberger at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and the most fleeting of all masterpieces. Cloud archaeology, writes Enzensberger, is a science for angels.

  Praise for the German edition

  After reading this wonderful volume of poetry one would like to call Enzensberger simply the lyric voice of transience. -- Sueddeutsche Zeitung

  With this book Enzensberger reveals himself both as a spokesman of persistence and as a decelerator. --Neue Zuercher Zeitung