in the green room
divided into rectangular lots
the desecrated lea
prayer-stools scattered across the meadow
the heart of Jesus opened its chest
on my hiking-shoes
five white cats' paws (foundering in oblivion)
deserted dog kennel
filled with plastic bags and refuse
stones in the bed the path's resting on
abandoned scene of a fire...

                    from 'landscape (bizarre)'

Friederike Mayröcker is one of Europe's most exciting avant-garde writers. In a career spanning more than sixty years, this 'dadaelian artificer' (Christopher Middleton) has pushed back the limits of convention to reveal the 'deep structure' of existence - its elation and its abysses. This collection contains more than three hundred poems from seven decades of Mayröcker's published works, as well as unpublished material from the years 2004 to 2006 which the poet has made available to her translator, Richard Dove. Raving Language is the first major selection of this great Austrian poet to appear in English.

Very consistently, in verse and prose, [Friederike Mayröcker] has combined collage procedures with fantasy and free association, relying on the imaginative power, elegance and inventiveness of her language alone to make up for the loss of referential coherence, linear plots in prose or 'subjects', as distinct from themes, in poems. Her combinations of the most disparate material have their being in total freedom. - Michael Hamburger

[Mayröcker] redefines the avant-garde, producing, over the course of a lifetime, a body of work that is experimental without being impersonal, incomprehensible, or armored in intellectual pretension. - Belle Randall