Elaine Feinstein, The Times, Saturday 25th March, 2006:

From minarets to Bleecker Street

The range of Joachim Sartorius's poetry arises naturally from an unusual life. Born in Franconia, Bavaria, in 1946, the son of diplomat, he grew up in Tunis and was educated at the Lycée de Carthage there, thus acquiring at a stroke the culture of a civilised Arab decadence and a sharp European clarity. He draws images from minarets, street cafés or the flapping sails of Mediterranean boats with equal fluency, making use both of the Bosphorus and of the Seine, where Paul Celan drowned himself in 1970.

Bleecker Street and Manhattan appear in his poetry too; but this is not poetic tourism. Sartorius is trying to make sense of the newly-understood Earth we all inhabit. In the title poem 'Ice Memory' the frozen waters hold the residues of all the disasters from the long history of the planet: volcanic ash from Krakatoa, lead pollution from Ancient Roman blast furnaces, and so on. Rather than meditating on the immensity of such an inheritance, however, men seem to have only one passion: the desire to discover some "imprint of our tiny naked feet" on the Earth's surface. The poem crackles with an ironic knowledge of human vanity.

As he explores Alexandria we sense his love of Cavafy. He imagines the city in 1903, when Ramleh was a main street in the foreigners' district, before leading us into a dark alley Cavafy might have entered when he was 40. In homage, Sartorius invents three new poems that purport to be from the Cavafy estate. His own poems have a colloquial lyricism that recalls that old master of the elegaic.

His imagination is often triggered by photographs, for instance one of Lilia Brik and Mayakovsky in Samarkand, and most notably in a poem for the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky where he evokes luminous skin stretched tightly over sharp cheekbones, as if he knew him personally, or had shared the black truths of the lager.

This is the first collection of Sartorius's poems in English, though individual poems have been appearing in magazines for some years. As a notable translator himself of American poets such as John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens, he might well have hoped this would happen earlier. He is fortunate in his translators now, however. These include Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton, Michael Hulse and Rosemarie Waldrop, as well as excellent versions from Richard Dove, who is the editor of the whole volume. Published with facing text in German, this is both an elegant book and an important one