Then again they hang low above us, heavy, for week and we sit and ponder in then shadow, that, shot with grey, casts no shadow, unhappy, until at last the sleepy blanket parts, a warm wind blows, all of a sudden the air is full of electric spirits, and we rush out of our houses, prancing in the reeling brightness of our dealings, while up there the artists of the sky, at last awake after long apathy, deliver their selfless performance.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of normality in everyday life, where the sutvival of the objects we use without thinking---a pair of scissors, perhaps---is both the victory of the unheroic and a reminder of our own transitoriness. The poems, laconic and conversational, sceptical and serene, culminate in the extended set of observations which gives the collection its title, Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and `the most fleeting of all masterpieces' are with us always and yet will get on perfectly well without us. `Cloud archaeology,' writes Enzensberger, is `a sceince for angels'.
In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking—a pair of scissors, perhaps—is both a small, human victory and a quiet reminder of our own ephemeral nature. He sets his quotidian reflections against a broad historic and political backdrop—the cold war and its accompanying atomic threat, the German student revolt, would-be socialism in Cuba, China, and Africa, and World War II as experienced by the youthful poet.
Enzensberger’s poems are conversational, skeptical, and serene; they culminate in the extended set of observations which gives the collection its title. Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, are for Enzensberger at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and “the most fleeting of all masterpieces.” “Cloud archaeology,” writes Enzensberger, is “a science for angels.”
Praise for the German edition
“After reading this wonderful volume of poetry one would like to call Enzensberger simply the lyric voice of transience.”— Sueddeutsche Zeitung
“With this book Enzensberger reveals himself both as a spokesman of persistence and as a decelerator.”—Neue Zuercher Zeitung
