HAUS FÜR POESIE

On this evening, four poets come together whose works seek to give language to individual and collective grief, asking how experiences of loss inscribe themselves into language and the body, and how poetic speech might preserve what resists understanding.

“There must be a way of drawing a picture so that it doesn’t become an elegy,” writes Victoria Chang (born 1970 in Detroit, USA) in her poetry collection OBIT (Copper Canyon Press 2020), which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Instead of the elegy – the classical poetic form of mourning – Chang writes more than 70 obituaries after her mother’s death, mourning everything she has lost while trying to break down an all-encompassing grief into smaller units of loss: the mother, the father (no longer himself after a stroke), the mother’s teeth, language, home, friendships – and herself, Victoria Chang, who watches her own children grow while her parents are dying and insists on remaining hopeful: “I am trying to / end this poem with hope, hope, hope, / see how the mouth stays open?”

The Irish poet Seán Hewitt (born 1990 in Warrington, UK) is currently shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize with his acclaimed coming-of-age novel Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape 2025). On this evening, he reads from his two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape 2020) and Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape 2024), in which loss and mortality – especially grief for the father, who died of cancer – form a central theme. Yet these poems speak from a post-catastrophic perspective and, despite the weight of grief, turn toward a larger mythopoetic context: “In this world, I believe / there is nothing lost, only translated.” With quiet gravity, they unfold and exert an immersive pull, finding connection, comfort, and grounding in nature: “when all is done, / and we are laid down in the earth, we might / listen, and hear love spoken back to us.”

“I gave birth prematurely / and breastfed for two years and he was nowhere / near to talking and he ran and ran all the time / and I lived alone in an apartment overlooking / the roofs” – in her poems and especially in her autobiographically inflected verse novel deca (LOM, 2021), awarded the NIN Prize for best novel of the year and published in German translation by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann as Kinder (Edition Korrespondenzen, 2025), Milena Marković (born 1974 in Belgrade) powerfully interweaves the traumas of her violence-marked youth in 1980s and 1990s Yugoslavia, drug excesses, life with her mother, who has dementia, and her cognitively impaired son. Melancholic, defiant, lamenting, often painfully candid, she describes how life slips through one’s fingers “and we are still not grown humans but / some mind of terrible children”.

In Bianca Stone’s (born 1983 in Vermont, USA) most recent collections, The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026) and What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), grief is a central concern. Rather than focusing on a specific loss, these books trace a more existential, pervasive grief rooted in the impossibility of preservation – the “benumbed spectacle of historic grief,” as Stone writes in “The Translation Elegies,” one of many poems in which she engages with Rilke’s elegies. In “Thoughts at the Grave”, Stone powerfully stages the question of whether poetry can serve as a form of preservation – or whether its inability to hold things in place instead intensifies their transience – through the figure of the sculptor Rodin: “How when a face emerged out of nothing / in his obsessive work, that what was hidden / in the stone was lost, once it was carved into something.”

Moderation Irina Bondas

The event will be interpreted into English and German.
Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

Funded by: British Council, Culture Ireland, Traduki