. i have the same number of words inside me
as all of you have words, the exact same numberbut how many times can they be combined? you
keep finding words that no one sang before you.. your godhead made you after his own image
. stark naked, blind—wild things that you are.– from “The Silent Songs of the Walls: l”
German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest poetry collection, recently released in Karen Leeder’s translation, is the modestly titled Shining Sheep—modest, that is after her 2016 offering, which appeared in English in 2020 as I Am A Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other— but it is by no means a more restrained effort. Rather, this new collection, originally published in German in 2022, is an especially dynamic, ambitious affair.
Several of the pieces here were commissioned for performances, films, or arose out of collaborations with fellow artists and musicians. This has been a hallmark of Sandig’s approach to poetry ever since her early days posting poems to lampposts and handing them out as flyers. But that collaborative, multi-instrumental quality is now more pronounced, not only through the visual presentation of the poems, often incorporating shaped or concrete poetry, but with the inclusion of links, where appropriate, to recordings and video performances that bring her poems to life off the page.
Opening with a single word, alone on a black page—“Lumière!”—Sandig’s poetry is a call to light, but one that resonates with a dark exuberance. She draws on a wide range of influences—German folk songs, writers, and history—to address political and social issues, never turning away from difficult subjects, like maternal depression and alcoholism, living with Covid, migration, and climate change.
just let that melt on your tongue:
shining sheep, genetically modified
as night storage for the dark hoursvisible in satellite images as little ghosts
their delicate shimmer on the radar
seems to be made to lullthe oppressive darkness between
the great golden bulls of the cities
into a comforting gleam.– from “Climate change is here, now. But we are also here, now. And if we don’t act, who will?”
Along with poems that arise out of commissions and direct collaborations with other artists, Sandig is also at times writing in response to, or in conversation with the work of late German authors, filmmakers and poets, including Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (“As When on Holidays,” 1800). Other pieces have their genesis in more immediate encounters outside the artistic community, past or present.
A particularly moving sequence, “Lamentations in VI Rounds,” arose, poet tells us, out of a chance connection with a young man from Afghanistan who contacted her after she accidentally left her bank card in a ticket machine on the Berlin underground. He and his large family were living in the city as failed asylum seekers. She stayed in contact with them and, from their stories, wrote a piece she called “Five Lamentations,” adding a sixth round for this final version after the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021.
the little man inside my head, he had
a daughter. he loved the way she boiled
minced beef, the way she answered back.
he loved the wonder of her eftertherain in Omid.Omid sold his daughter in exchange for the value
of a ticket to Germany. today she called him up.
she sounded like she was sitting in his ear.
the pear tree in the yard was doing fine.
Shining Sheep is Sandig’s third poetry collection to be released in English, and the most inventive and experimental to date. Her long-time translator, Karen Leeder, is well attuned to the nuances of her uniquely playful, yet melancholic verse, bringing this energy and adventurousness to the forefront here. For a taste Sandig’s poetry and performances(with Leeder’s subtitles where available), her YouTube channel is well worth a visit.
Shining Sheep by Ulrike Almut Sandig is translated from the German by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books.
roughghosts 