Glimpses of a true poet at work

AFTER Nature is a series of three connected prose poems by the late WG Sebald, written and published - in German as always - almost 15 years ago, before he began writing his acclaimed novels.

Their publication now, half a year after his sudden and early death, might look like respectful memorialising, but Michael Hamburger's translations were completed before Sebald's death and the poems themselves are no simple adjunct or prequel to the rest of his oeuvre. Sebald's prose has often been described as poetic; his poems on the other hand are deliberately unlyrical.

With their flat, unsentimental cadences and doggedly blank verse, it's hard to see at first glance why he used this form.

The first poem, As the Snow on the Alps, about the 16th century painter Matthaeus Grunewald, is so stuffed with matters of fact that at times it resembles a transcribed talk.

The second poem, about the zoologist of the Bering expedition, Georg Wilhelm Steller, is also heavily factual and the third, AFTER NATURE by WG Sebald translated by Michael Hamburger (Hamish Hamilton, pounds 12.99) CLAIRE HARMAN tracing Sebald's life from his conception in wartime through his childhood "on the northern edge of the Alps" to his life in Manchester and East Anglia, is as near autobiography as we are likely to get from this highly self-referential, yet deeply evasive writer.

The extreme plainness of Sebald's style allows him to be both serious-minded yet sardonic about it, too, when he wants to be, as in sentences like this where he seems to be trying to lose us: "Here the Canons Regular,/ the legendary history of whose order/ is traced back to the anchorite/ Antonius the Hermit who/ in the year An uneasy sense of national identity: Hilaire Belloc was born in France but viewed himself as a Sussex patriot 357 departed this life/ in the Theban desert, in 1300/ acquired a site from the Murbach/ Cluniacs to found an Antonian Hospital ..." etc.

This laying on of circumstantial detail is familiar from Sebald's novels, which delight in diversions and narrative dead-ends, unlike the novels, which are packed with photos and facsimiles.

After Nature doesn't have any illustrations, though one of its prevailing themes - as the title suggests - is depiction, and several sections are about paintings (Grunewald's altarpieces at Isenheim and Mainz) or photographs (part 1 of Dark Night Sallies Forth describes a series of family pictures).

Despite the rigorously documentary style of this book, it could have benefited from an introduction or some notes about Grunewald and Steller - and Sebald himself, for that matter.

One of the links between the poems seems to be the town of Windsheim in Franconia, where both Sebald and Steller were born, and where, in section seven of the first poem, Grunewald is shown conversing with two Nrnberg draughtsmen called Barthel and Sebald Beham. Fiction or history?

In Sebald's novel Vertigo, written only a year or two after these poems, the narrator's home town is such an obsessive focus of melancholy that he protects its name as if it were a victim of crime, calling it merely W-.

Grounding some of the factual side of the poems would help to let the other parts soar. It is really not enough to have such a book described in the blurb as "focusing on the conflict between man and nature".

After Nature was Sebald's "first literary work"; it also seems to be his most ambitious work, with a core of astonishing writing, particularly in As the Snow on the Alps: "To try out how far it can go/ is the sole aim of this sprouting,/ perpetuation and proliferation/ inside us also and through us and through/ the machines sprung from our heads,/ all in a single jumble,/ while behind us already the green/ trees are deserting their leaves and/ bare, as often they appear in Grunewald's/ pictures, loom up into the sky."

Much in this book illuminates Sebald's later development into one of the most original fiction writers of the past 20 years but, more importantly, in uncomfortably blinding flashes, we see a true poet at work.

Copyright 2002
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