Venus in the Poodle

A demonstration of the persuasiveness that poetry can muster even in our own era. Paul Wühr's large-scale poetic cycle, Venus im Pudel, provides new insights into male/female relationships, the concepts of marriage and family and their related religious and political connotations. Almost everything is presented and enacted by the archetypal "he" and "she" who, although frequently crossing gender limitations, nevertheless remain a couple. Time and again, Wühr draws upon the images of "the other" and "the spirit of the flesh". His style combines baroque richness and a laconic sparsity, it surprises and shocks. Its most impressive quality, however, is the heroically unfashionable attempt to wrestle with one of humanity's great themes in poetic language. Paul Wühr's poetry relentlessly questions all thinking that claims to be "right" and is in its (self-)presentation a radically creative counter-model to the natural and social orders of life. The more obvious a society becomes, he suggests, the more ambiguous poetry has to be. Once again, Paul Wühr defends his place as one of the great, original and utterly incomparable poets of our time.