In these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity.  Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.  

Ernst Meister has rarely before been translated into English, and yet his is a poetry which deals with the big issues: love, death, freedom, security and the ambiguity of existence. In this compelling new translation, the reader may accompany Meister not just into the mindset of individual poems, but also through a series of poetic wrestlings with life to a final confrontation with approaching death which very few poets have attempted with such clarity. There is nothing morbid or depressing about these poems, and if the poet's conclusions are unflinching, they are also both startling and uplifting.