Collected Prose

A collection of prose, some unbelievably brief in length, by Paul Celan, one of Europe's foremost poets. Celan, who was scarred by the concentration camps, pushed language to its every edge -- and beyond -- in his poems. The essay "Meridian," in this volume, is his longest commentary on what poetry is, and what it does. It is a remarkable essay, dense yet readable, provocative, erudite, astonishingly full of insights on the relation between poet and history, between poetry and the "altogether other" (as Celan puts it). "The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of the encounter?" I find I can meditate on what he says at great length, and with great richness. As a teacher of literature, I cannot think of an essay that blows me away as powerfully as this one. Although it claims to be about poems, it is about living in a social world, a world that exists in historical time; it is likewise about how each of us faces into language, how we face ourselves, how we face the other human beings who live around us and whom we contact through language. Here is Celan at his richest and best: if this excites you, you will want to read this book. And if not, not. "The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls iself back from an 'already-no-more' into a 'still-here.' This 'still-here' can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and--not just verbally--'corresponding' to something."