Witty and wise, playful and philosophical, the poems and other short writings of German poet Michael Augustin are instantly recognisable and not easily forgotten. In his most substantial English-language volume to date (translated by Indian poet Sujata Bhatt, who is also Augustin's wife), the poems, mini plays and short prose pieces that make up Mickle Makes Muckle are typically terse but luminous, and always, it would appear, somewhat puzzled by the strange fact of their existence-no doubt one of the many reasons they seem to speak so directly to the reader.

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua: many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt's many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa's sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter's voice in birdsong - and the 'poppies in translation' mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the 'haunted undertow' of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, 'with their black souls in the wind'.

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Her's is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.

This is the definitive collection of poems from Sujata Bhatt, an award-winning author of Indian, German, and English experience. With works that span Bhatt's entire career--from her early pieces when her imagination stays close to India and its languages, people, and customs to her family's exile and move to Europe and her education in the United States--the poems continue in their vocation of reinvention. More than anything, these pieces show that in Bhatt's work, poetry is a place where nothing is certain and there are surprises with each reading.

Revolving around the public and private lives of the great modern painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, this collection explores the artist's relationship with her craft and her friendship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff. Inspired by the artist's numerous self-portraits, Bhatt transports the image of Modersohn-Becker to present-day Germany. This book-length sequence of poems presents a rich and fully conceived history of the inner and outer worlds of one of the century's great modern painters.

Witty and wise, playful and philosophical, the poems and other short writings of German poet Michael Augustin are instantly recognisable and not easily forgotten. In his most substantial English-language volume to date (translated by Indian poet Sujata Bhatt, who is also Augustin's wife), the poems, mini plays and short prose pieces that make up Mickle Makes Muckle are typically terse but luminous, and always, it would appear, somewhat puzzled by the strange fact of their existence-no doubt one of the many reasons they seem to speak so directly to the reader