Must You Sleep Tonight

For almost a decade-and-a-half and with four collections of poems, Evelyn Schlag has been a predominant voice in contemporary poetry. Love and nature are the central topics of her verse, celebrated in a calm, yet urgent language insisting on the poetical

In the elegies, songs and narrative prose-poems of this volume, Schlag explores the terrains of landscape and love, always aware of the ambivalence of leave-taking and intimacy: longing for the "open arms and books of a man" on the one hand, and the desire "to remain faithful to you, but different" on the other; travel songs full of foreboding and sketches of favourite routes: "Following the mountain crest/the shadowy slope to the left/to the right my sunny French country".