POEM OF THE WEEK

One of the most acclaimed German poets writing today, Durs Grünbein revisited the bombing of his hometown, Dresden, in Porcelain (2005), a remarkable book-length sequence in 49 parts, its rhymes and half-rhymes now brilliantly rendered in English by Karen Leeder in Psyche Running, a new translation of Grünbein’s recent work.

Though well aware that he’s too young to have witnessed the devastation first-hand (or “too green”, as he puts it, punning on the “Grün” of his surname), Grünbein shows how the bombing’s legacy lingers in “the words you heard from childhood on / the family sigh ‘Poor city’”, and explores the city’s tendency to mythologise itself. Resisting both “trashy melodrama” and sentiment with a self-critical stance that recalls Geoffrey Hill, Porcelain is a clear-eyed, questioning, captivating poem. Tristram Fane Saunders

One Three FROM PORCELAIN

Why complain, Johnny-come-lately? Dresden was long gone when your little light first appeared on the scene.

Moist eyes are not the same as grey hair, my son.

And as your name suggests you’re too quick for it, too green. Seventeen years, barely a childhood, was all it took to erase what had been there before. The sombre grey of uniformity had closed the wounds and magic ceded to – bureaucracy. No need to slay the Saxon peacock.

Lichen blossomed on the sandstone flowers, implacably. Why brood? It comes back like hiccups: elegy.

Say after me: it doesn’t take much to make a moonscape of a city. Or charcoal of the folk who lived there. Imagine this: in the time it takes to nip out of the opera for a pack of fags, the streets were death traps, bubbling with tar.

Just now, frost, hands frozen blue on the handlebars, then the sea of houses was raked by desert winds. Stiff as pharaohs in their winter coats they burned. Never was a summer hotter. The last alarm hardly faded – and the ashes were still warm.