No Beginning and No End

When Christoph Meckel’s Gesammelte Gedichte (Collected Poetry) was published in 2015, readers and critics acclaimed him as one of the great German poets of the present day. His new volume, which is the first for many years, is a sensation: a work as powerful as it is rare in modern-day poetry. »The sea must be somewhere, it must/ still be there like the wind and evening /the path through the evening.«

Christoph Meckel is a poet of sensory perception – hearing, smell, taste. And, at the same time, precise words, hardship without illusion and critical wilfulness. He returns to the public eye with a volume that addresses the great themes of a poet’s life: the time between day and night, the strange and the familiar, and over and again, the sea, the image of change and infinity per se. No Beginning and No End confirms Christoph Meckel’s status as an exceptional poet.