A century and a half after his birth, Rainer Maria Rilke remains woven into English-speaking culture in ways unexpected for a serious modern poet, and especially one writing in German. Many readers will know individual titles from the two volumes of, presented here in full. But the vast majority of these poems are little known in the English-speaking world. In John Greening’s fresh, lively translation, the tidal pull of Rilke’s internal music and astonishing imagery is strengthened by the poems’ elaborate rhyme and meter. As Greening suggests in his detailed introduction, these disparate pieces coalesce to reveal something we didn’t know we were waiting to find.
