... [this is] Ernst Meister's work at its best continuing 'Hölderlin's line of succession' (in Michael Hamburger's experienced judgement). The translator, Jean Boase-Beier, is the commissioning editor of the Arc Visible Poets' series, and is therefore expected to maintain a high quality of work. In this she has bravely succeeded, as Meister is very difficult to translate, as exacting as Hölderlin or Celan in his ambiguities and intellectuality, what Meister himself calls his 'dark reason'. (The equivalent I think would be to attempt to render Geoffrey Hill in German.) What interests Meister (and in this he is very much like Hill) is the way language, and especially cliché, corrupts the truth and corrodes judgement. His poems, as John Hartley Williams argues, draw the reader into 'the final puzzle of seeing', the guilt associated with the Holocaust, a topic especially painful to the German public:

'Starved skeletons, giant / spiders supporting / one another, groped and / crawled to the / barbed-wire, in order to / cross. How, of course, / it caught them. / l will not forget.' The staccato effect achieved here is lust right in the circumstance where hope is lost and God is only 'a hollowed name'. Not even a little suffices, not even a little light 'threaded through our bodies'. On certain days, however, there is

such epiphanies sustaining the day. Weighted as they are with being human, with 'begging words made of poverty and fire', Jean Boase Beier's versions engage and involve the reader, the translations shadowing Meister's poems crafted and 'bared right down to the clay', confronting the guilt and shame of history as bravely as Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.