A Change in the Light

»Once I was a cuckoo fired from a clock/and all the time in the world was mine.« Tom Schulz’s poems gate-crash the everyday world with overtures of self-possession that will change the reader’s world forever.

Tom Schulz is the romantic visionary among Germany’s younger poets. He indulges in emphasis »bordering on linguistic rapture« and doesn’t shirk from extolling the moon or the creatures and birds of the forest. But then the woods abruptly fill with »tubes and bottles of blood« (from a tragedy or a television serial?) that lacerate the rural idyll, tearing it to shreds.

Whether writing lyrical travelogues, political verses or elegies of love and lament, it is always the transitions that interest Tom Schulz – the changes in light that mark the passage into uncertain territory where everything is radically transformed. Tom Schulz evokes these transformations of reality in language merging highbrow register with quotidian idiom: »never mind how you get here/ be it in the guise of a dog or a primrose/ just make sure you get here.«