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Born in Nuremberg in 1951, Gerhard Falkner has made a name as an essayist, anthologist, dramatist and translator, but it is above all as a poet that he has had a defining influence on German literature over the past 25 years (a phare, in Baudelaire’s sense, in whose light various younger figures have been able to find their bearings in the postmodern darkness).

   Falkner’s first two collections (1981 and 1984) provoked a frisson nouveau – after years of flaccid parlando, their freshness and urgency seemed to have sprung straight from Zeus’s (or rather Marinetti’s) head. There are experiments in the high style (Klopstock) and at the same time poems flirting heavily with dialect (Bavarian, Swiss) and American “low demotic” (“my whole ass went crazy!”). Love poems are not infrequent, but they come with a hard cubist edge:


   the grey and the cold (das grave und das kalte)

you are the grey, are you
and i, i am the cold. 
i am the skin, am i
and you, you are the fold
you are obnubilation, wickedness
are the wedge into the old
i am the splintering, iced-over thing
clawed into your heart of gold.
i am what’s meted out to you, am i
what is conglobate and you the grey
lasting space in which i dwelt

He has also shocked the “chopped-up-prose” school with other rhymed poems, of a kind which the early Expressionists Heym, Hoddis or Blass might have written if they had survived: “[. . .] that drunkenness, that tremor in your pessary / it speaks to you the language saving me”. Not least, there is a stubborn refusal to live in the eternal springtime of amnesia: “on the blackboard / a volatised jew erases / german music”.

   What have always been striking are Falkner’s linguistic dislocations and “destabilisations”. “Zukunft”, the conventional word for future, becomes “umkunft”. Primeval thought and primeval sensation are yoked forcibly together in the neologism “Heraclitoris”. We stumble across a “ricochet ode” which ends: “from coast to coast / you measure twelve thousand exhalations / whose nerve-inmate i am”. And Wittgenstein’s celebrated peroratio suddenly reads “What i cannot be silent against / against that let me sing!” Such a commitment to “diffArence” is signalled in the title of his third collection wemut (1989) – roughly “nostalgia”, but without the “g” – and is endemic in his latest book, Endogene Gedichte (2000), where the world morphs into the “open” and “closed” wards of a psychiatric hospital. It is not easy to forget visual poems such as ‘Poem for 162 commas’ (an apparent deconstruction of Morgenstern’s deconstruction of Goethe) and ‘Gloriam in Expressis’
(about a train journey from Berlin to the Apocalypse), or his sequence ‘Mallarméan ladders’, probably inspired by Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. The same goes for his excoriations of the fun society: “Craig Venter decodes the genome / without seeing that it is God’s sperm”.

   An inveterate modernist left standing in a postmodern world? A
“language-inspector” (to quote the poem ‘die sprachbeschauer’, built on the analogy of “fleischbeschauer”, meat-inspector, and
“leichenbeschauer”, autopsist)? A Junger Wilder who remains locked in a dialogue with the Hölderlin tradition? A “troubadour of modern times” (Kurt Drawert)? There are too many Falkners for a single definition to be meaningful. What he has certainly done is to revitalise German poetry with his arresting and entirely unpredictable images – night, for example, “taut as a grape from Friaul” or sunny days “bombastically round / and bombastically empty / like the enormous brassières / on a Polish clothespole”. His sensuousness (in the Miltonic sense) is tantamount to a new beginning: “on the other shore / of the room / a woman is standing / is she playing the trumpet? / laughing? cutting tampons? / i’m glad how amber-coloured / she is. all my possessions / she’s been (and how much she’s possessed me)” (‘break of day’).