Of Entirety Say the Sentence - by Ernst Meister (Paperback)

About the Book

Completes an informal trilogy by Meister, one of the great lyric post-war German poets.

Book Synopsis

"Like his subject matter Meister's writing is ominous, intangible and inescapable."--Publishers Weekly

"The translators of Wallless Space were brave to take on Meister's dense and unusual poetry, and so far their work has been excellent. . . . Foust and Frederick have preserved the phonetic elements of Meister's verse--assonance, alliteration, rhyme, anaphora--without sacrificing the poet's distilled diction and powerfully short dimeter and trimeter lines."--Christopher Shannon, Words Without Borders

One of the last books by post-war German poet and Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister--and the third to be translated into English by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick--Of Entirety Say the Sentence is his most expansive book. With rich allusions to Hölderlin and Celan, these poems are staggering in their scope of mortality, time, and infinity.

Mankind
has his song to sing,
and even though I am
shaken by the world's silence,
I don't want to fling anything
over the crown of his head.

Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany. He was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize.

Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver.

Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.

Review Quotes

Arguably the most emotionally resonant of Meister's late trilogy, this collection carves out a much-needed space for an essential and often overlooked poet.
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany, and studied first theology, then literature, art history, and philosophy (the latter under Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer) at various German universities. After the publication of his first book in 1932, he published no poetry for two decades, a silent spell that ultimately gave way to the prolific last third of his life, over the course of which he produced more than sixteen volumes of verse as well as numerous other literary and visual works. Often compared to Paul Celan because of the brevity and difficulty of his poems, Meister tends toward a more abstract existentialism that renders his work both intensely emotional and inimitably strange. Having written outside the dominant literary circles of his time, he remains relatively unknown, though he was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, having been informed of the honor just days before his death. Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick have translated Meister's informal trilogy which includes In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012), Wallless Space (Wave Books, 2014) and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave Books, 2015).

Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver. With Samuel Frederick, he has translated three volumes of poetry by Ernst Meister, including In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012), Wallless Space (Wave Books, 2014), and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave Books, 2015).

Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University. With Graham Foust he has translated three volumes of poetry by Ernst Meister, including In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012), Wallless Space (Wave Books, 2014), and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave Books, 2015).