After Nature

After Nature by WG Sebald, translated by Michael Hamburger, 116 pages

 

This is a collection of biographical poems, published posthumously, meditating on the experiences of painter Matthias Grunewald, arctic explorer Georg Steller, and author Sebald himself, as they encounter the world and find their place in relation to it.  Sebald's equally lyrical descriptions of Grunewald's canvasses, arctic wastes, and Manchester rubbish heaps form beautiful verbal landscapes, while his sketches of the personalities manages to be simultaneously uncommonly vivid and realistically elusive.