Afterletters

Poetry. In 1948, in the exhausted aftermath of WWII, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann met in Vienna and began an intense but intermittent relationship. Celan, a German-speaking Jew whose parents had been murdered in Nazi labour camps, had escaped from the rising communist regime in Romania and was on his way to Paris, where he would write the poems that transformed, shattered and (perhaps) redeemed the German language "after Auschwitz." Bachmann, the daughter of a member of the Austrian Nazi party, was writing her at the University of Vienna. Along with Celan, she would go on to become one of the most important writers in the German language in the mid-20th century. Bachman and Celan's relationship continued until the 1960s, documented in the letters they exchanged. In AFTERLETTERS, R. Kolewe has used fragments of their letters and works to give us a sequence of lyric poems that explore something every reader can relate to: the traces of loss and love in language that breaks, recombines and scintillates, "star-crossed, star- covered, star-thrown."