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Stefan Tobler

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Henning Ahrens

 

Henning Ahrens is not a purely German poet. Born in north Germany in 1964, he studied English literature, publishing a doctoral thesis on John Cowper Powys. He has had two books of poetry published in Germany, Lieblied was kommt, 1998, from which these poems come, and Stoppelbrand, 2000. He works as a translator of English-language fiction.

   His poems wrestle a dynamism from his home area’s apparently unprepossessing flat farm lands. He comes from a farming family and this life is a central preoccupation of his poetry. In this he seems to look more to British and Irish poets such as Ted Hughes, George Mackay Brown or Seamus Heaney than to the mainstream of recent German poetry. Wulf Kirsten would be one older German poet with a similar interest in the land and people in it.

   He is obviously a poet for whom the poem is to be heard. It is a full-bodied song and spell more than a story. He re-works traditional poetic forms. The latest collection has shown that his repertoire is expanding, sometimes loosening up into longer, more colloquial cycles.

 

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