Book Launch - In cooperation with the Goethe Society Wellington
Through close readings of poems covering the span of Georg Trakl's lyric output, this study traces the evolution of his strangely mild and beautiful vision of the end of days.
Like much German language poetry of the years preceding the First World War, the poems of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) are imbued with a sense of historical crisis, but what sets his work apart is the mildness and restraint of his images of universal disintegration. Trakl typically couched his vision of the end of days in images of migrating birds, abandoned houses, and closing eyelids, making his poetry at once apocalyptic, rustic, and intimate.
Author
Richard Millington is Senior Lecturer in German at Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand). He is the author of "Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets" (2012).
