fugitive moons

Yevgeniy Breyger is one of the most outstanding young voices in German-language poetry of the new century. Jan Kuhlbrodt once aptly described Breyger as a poet not only "knowing all the tricks of the rhythmical trade," but whose poems recall "a kabbalistic incantation," a "mysticism that turns into the absurd, yet also emerges from it once more." Breyger allows himself to revive the old idea of the magic of language without buying into its pathos; he allows himself to probe language once more for all its potential; the result is an astounding lyric debut.

In fugitive moons, a central motif of German Romanticism - the moon - is manipulated. The moon appears in the plural, a team in flight. From whom is one fleeing? Who no longer wishes to remain where they once were? Instead of running yearningly into open arms, one takes to one's heels and seeks distance; perhaps, then, not only a central motif of Romanticism, but a central feeling of a generation that spent its childhood in the 1990s and its youth in the 2000s in Europe. Everything can be desired except desire itself.

And with that, this motif - so often a dumping ground in the history of German-language literature - is still not exhausted. For the moon is also one of the many rulers of the tides; what it leaves behind, or what it reveals with the move-ments of the sea, showing what it has hidden in its belly, can only be presented through a kind of linguistic magic. In this way, all manner of debris washes ashore as these poems traverse the world like Rimbaud's legendary bateau ivre; monstrous beings appear, the monstrous within the everyday appears. Visible, for instance, are the "sand families" that give their names to cycles, the "plant families"; visible, too, that the intensely yearning, post-Romantic poet Trakl "was afraid of staplers, cockroaches, children and amphorae."