White Book

After Hotels and Tropen, the new volume of poems by Raoul Schrott embraces an unexpected combination of concepts: holiness, hunting and love. Poetry with the "power to shake the walls of the world." (Süddeutsche Zeitung).

An original, poetic grammar of the world is presented in these new poems by Raoul Schrott. They can be read, at one level, as poems about love in its many guises: true and false, unrequited and jealous, entranced and erotic. They are also entries in a log book of journeys extending across oceans and continents: from Sicily to Samarkand, from Rio and Havana to New Guinea. And they harbour the big topics of poetry in the tradition of Petrarch. Raoul Schrott unfolds these themes by combining three ancient motifs – love, the holy, and the hunt - and presenting them as allegories of human behaviour.

In language that is artful and stealthy, buoyant and accurate, Raoul Schrott also demonstrates qualities uncommon in contemporary poetry: his exciting poems, full of stories, put the whole world in the reader's pocket.