Pitch & Glint - by Lutz Seiler (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, "You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound."

Review Quotes

"Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century." --Joshua Weiner, POETRY magazine

"Meticulously translated from German, these poems create an inimitable sound world where everything is muted as if beneath a blanket of snow, whispering, sizzling, crackling." --Philip Terry, The Guardian

"This is a new kind of eco-poetry, born out of the last days of the GDR, with broken syntax, truncated rhythms, odd juxtapositions, neologisms, ampersands and a rejection of standard capitalization." --Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

"Lutz Seiler's Pitch & Glint ... uses broken and glitchy language to reflect the fractures of East German history... These poems, and their English translation by Stefan Tobler, are a rare achievement." --Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Best poetry books of 2023

"Pitch & Glint unfurls against the backdrop of late-twentieth-century East Germany, a landscape strewn with spoilheaps, disappeared villages, "snow, oil and phlegm". Wandering over this uncertain terrain, Seiler meditates hauntingly on the disembodied lives emerging from its midst - and Tobler's stark, elegant translations do a fine job of capturing the essential interplay of muscularity and vaporousness at its heart. This is an exquisite, humane, deliciously shadowy verse music - a real-world Stalker with line-breaks." --Alex Niven

"Pitch & Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost." --Michael Krüger

"Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR." --Michael Hofmann, TLS, International Books of the Year

"Seiler's poems are immersive, unpredictable journeys into a past that is both irrecoverably lost and hauntingly present. They are at once soundscapes and dream-narratives, their language propulsive and furious and broken." --Patrick McGuinness

"Recording this music requires such fluid syntax, allowing sentences to slip over and under each other to make new meanings. The force of this music made me reconsider the values of the broad field of ecological poetry." Harry Josephine Giles, Poetry Book Society's Translation Choice selector

"Lutz Seiler began as a bricklayer and ended up building poems. 'Why I started to read and write, I have no idea, ' he says, but we should be glad. Pitch & Glint created a storm when it was published in its original German. Finally these poems are translated into English by Stefan Tobler."
Chris McCabe, Librarian of the National Poetry Library, UK

"The Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious prize in German literature, has been awarded to a magician of poetic language. [...] A true conjuror, he has rightly joined the company of his great countryman Wolfgang Hilbig, that other bulwark of German poetry and prose." Evelyn Schlag, PN Review

"A seminal work of German verse translated into radiant English for the first time [...]
Like the uranium that underlaid Seiler's childhood, Pitch & Glint burns with an unstable power." Jack Barron, The Arts Desk

"Epoch-making." --Angelika Overath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises." --Ursula Krechel, Der Tagesspiegel

"Here the contemporary appears with archaic force." --Helmut Böttiger, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. [...] Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound." --Lothar Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch & Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds." --Martin Ahrends, Die Zeit

About the Author

Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. After an apprenticeship in construction, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Haus. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His volume of non-fiction In Case of Loss and the poetry collection Pitch & Glint are published in 2024 in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in journals and magazines including Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry, PROTOTYPE, the New Statesman, Shearsman, Stand, the TLS and The White Review.

Born in Belém, Brazil, to English and Swiss parents, Stefan Tobler is a translator and the founder of And Other Stories. Authors he has translated include Clarice Lispector, Raduan Nassar and Arno Geiger. He grew up in northern Brazil and southern England, and has now made his home in the Dark Peak.