Poems

In cities strange and yet weirdly familiar, women watched by monstrous demons give birth to headless infants, vast gods straddle apartment blocks and gaze balefully out on an urban hell, and the savage giant War dances wildly on the mountains while a mighty city sinks into an abyss. The poet Georg Heym saw what we have all come to see, and it was not long after his death in 1912 that readers heard in him a prophet. These poems rich in images of the city and war, of death and decay, for which Heym is best known, have their place in this book, the first volume of Heym's work to appear in English. But here too are poems haunted by other spirits: sonnets of a chill formal perfection offer vignettes of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath; others are shaped by a rich and strange mixture of classical antiquity and the Gothic macabre; others still, among Heym's later works, are some of the finest love poems and elegies ever to be written in the German language.