Friederike Mayröcker

Friederike Mayröcker (b. 1924) is considered the most important German language poet of the last thirty years, with a growing oeuvre of more than 100 published works. Scardanelli is the most recent volume of poetry written by Mayröcker, an invocation of the late 19th Century poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose name weaves its way around the transience of all living things as a call to remembrance. Mayröcker writes in the hallucinatory register she herself has often identifies as post-surreal, making use of serial techniques (day/month/year) while simultaneously professing an acutely personal voice and vision, so that tears of loss and loneliness are felt as the luminous ink of the page. (Photo credit: courtesy of the author)