ABSTRACT
Klaus Merz was becoming increasingly well-known in German-speaking countries, and his collected writings, seven volumes in all, were beginning to appear in a splendid cloth edition. Many of Merz's poems similarly point to, or move back up into, an inner world. The poet keeps moving upstream, as it were, toward an elementary poetic language as well, whence the perfectly appropriate deceptive simplicity of his vocabulary. Not all of Merz's early poems are about love. Some pieces relate odd coincidences or funny juxtapositions, such as a farmer who takes his tape recorder out into his field during a drought and plays Handel's 'Water Music'. Merz has actually written as much prose as poetry, and in a variety of mostly short forms. Drawing on daily life in the 1950s and early 1960s (which encompasses, amusingly, the use of a shortwave radio), Merz depicts a distraught Swiss family unable to get past mourning and get on with living.
