ABSTRACT
Born in Silesia, Piontek settled in Munich after the war. He is known primarily as a lyric poet in a traditional mould, continuing the line of nature poetry represented by Lehmann and Britting, although his laconic free verse occasionally suggests more modern affinities. In programmatic statements he has adopted a conservative position vis-à-vis experimentalists (e.g. Heißenbüttel) and politically engaged poets. Although his work is marked by a non-rational approach to imagery and by an existentialism with Christian overtones, he has written narrative poems, including ‘Die Verstreuten’ on the flight of refugees from the East at the end of the Second World War, and has edited the anthology Neue deutsche Erzählgedichte (1964). Since Gesammelte Gedichte (1975), which assembles poems from six volumes published between 1952 and 1971, four further volumes have appeared. Piontek has also written four novels, Die mittleren Jahre (1967), on the mid-life crisis of the narrator, a prematurely retired teacher, who looks back on episodes from his life, especially relationships to wife, daughter and lover, Dichterleben (1976), in which the decision made by a fifty-year-old writer to abandon his profession is reversed after encouragement by a younger man on the threshold of a similar career, Juttas Neffe (1979) and Zeit meines Lebens (1984), the latter an autobiographical novel. These, together with numerous essays (e.g. Buchstab Zauberstab (1959), Männer die Gedichte machen (1970) and Das Handwerk des Lesens (1972)), short stories, plays, mainly for radio, and the poems, have been collected in Werke in 6 Bänden (1985).
