Martin Box, AMBIT magazine

Carcanet, like Anvil, introduce us to the foreign writers we should know about and here produce a fine selected poems of Joachim Sartorius. He is now a professor in berlin, having been amongst other things a diplomat in New York, Instanbul, Prague and Nicosia. He also spent part of his youth outside Germany:

'I came to Tunis at the age of ten, went to the Lysee de Carthage, and - during my first winter there - discovered silver Punic coins after heavy rainfall in the pubbles in the schoolyard.'

A bilingual edition, Ice Memory draws on four collections, and is translated by a number of distinguished translators - Richard Dove, for example, the editor and a major translator - and has an afterword by Christopher middleton, also a translator. There are love poems in all four collections - like 'The First Night' from Mine is the Night (2003):

That a woman can disperse herself within me
without caring for me;
that every twilight, in order to become beautiful,
I am compelled to this room...

Not surprisingly, the mediterranean, and indeed antiquity if you like, features in many of the poems but equally there's a fine one on the death of Manhatten. Cavafy is a major influence - this from 'Cavafy contradicts Seneca' (a translation of Dove)

At home at 7 Lepsius Street,
he didn't light the lamps sa as to be able
to play all the better with forbidden
memories, images...

'On the way to the tomb of Kleoboulos' seemed a bit too contrived for me:

Now it is night, dark as night.
Now the black rolling landscape has withdrawn
from sight.

But this is more than made up for by the many very exciting poems. The range, as Middleton notes in his script, is broad and one hopes that this first English version of him will be followed by translation of him on a regular basis.