Joachim Sartorius inhabits the shady and fertile region where East meets West. In his new, long-awaited volume of poems, we once again find his half imagined, half real cities: Alexandria, Nicosia, Syracuse and Istanbul.
The secret of travel and the secret of wonder become one in writing. Sartorius goes in search of the tales of the eastern Mediterranean and the blank spaces in the cultures of the Levant. He juxtaposes the places and myths located on the White Sea with a long verse cycle about a village in Brandenburg and poems about beauty and transience. The paradox that poetry illuminates precisely the meaninglessness of our everyday activities and thereby is able to give them meaning runs through the entire book.
“His verses are at once very emotional and very intellectual. They go straight for the jugular, as if poetry were the acid test for love. And vice versa.” – Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
