Variations on a Rain Barrel

Jan Wagner takes poetic measure of our natural environment with scientific precision.
The fruits of his excursions – from sloes in the frost to Sicilian donkeys and on to cayman hunts – tempt us to the
realisation that true secrets only reveal themselves in poetry.
The garden where the rain barrel stands is fantastically wide, open and abundant — a world unto itself. Jan Wagner’s latest volume of poetry takes us into the realm of botany, celebrating nature in all its artful variations on life. He captivates our senses with his exaltation of the ground elder’s foaming whiteness, focuses his poetic lens on the pussy willow and the strangler fig, the morels and saltbush, the owl and the otter, zooms in close and distant, fading and dissolving until our gaze meets the horizon. Time and again, we can’t help but marvel at the way this poet manages to conjure up compact images that speak entire volumes within a few lines, so that things long-forgotten or never previously seen stand vivid and sharp before our eyes.