Deep in his sleep Man crosses yellow legs.
He kneels on the profound floor of his mouth.
A sombre eye dreams up a sombre body.
His head, upturned, revolves round in a dream.
His dreams dream groundless dreams dream groundless sooth.
 

from `L'Homme machine bleue II'
              

Ernst Meister, described by Walter Jens as `the tenderest epic poet
imaginable', was an outsider, out of step from the start, publishing his first book months before the Nazis came to power. After the war he re-emerged, writing runic verse in the teeth of a Brechtian orthodoxy that emphasised relevance and political definition. He defied the trends of the 1960s and early 1970s, preferring to refine and deepen his explorations. His philosophical concerns are never abstract: the paradoxes of Heidegger, the challenges of Nietzsche, are urgently real. His integrity recalls the very different struggle of Paul Celan.
`We're shoes that do not fit God's feet,' he says. God may be dead, but his shadow moves on Meister's world and fans the embers that the poet tends.