The Unknown Rilke
"Oh gods, gods! / You frequent infiltrators, sleepers inside things, / who rise exulting..." In this posthumous collection of poems and poetic fragments, Rilke (1875-1926) invokes the divine frequently. Yet "even to look at a star / requires some small earthly base," and the poetry moves most when it serves as a link between ourselves and what is beyond. In his communions here, Rilke is hardly "unknown," his elegaic, melancholy, and joyful moods are typically limpid and transcendent. But Wright (Entry in an Unknown Hand), a poet himself, has translated the German with a refreshing vernacular purity. "I think Rilke was quite literally seeking to create a visionary condition which might be prolonged indefinitely," he comments in the introduction, and the English allows that moment to last. The first half of the book, composed largely of retellings of Bible stories, and including the sequenceThe Life of Mary, is an oblique testament of faith from a man who apparently believed more in the authority of creation than of God. The second half is by nature more miscellaneous. In his seeking, not his finding, Rilke continues to reach us. --Independent Publisher