An Audible Blue: Selected Poems

Klaus Merz is a German-Language Swiss poet who has been praised as an artisan of the understatement. This important volume gathers work from his fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016. Merz's poetry is known for its power to illuminate the unexpected in the smallest of details. The volume brings together selections from Merz's fifteen collections, showcasing his skill in crafting concise and insightful poems.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 230 pages
Publication date: 06 October 2022
Publisher: White Pine Press

Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated.

As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.”

This seminal volume brings together selections from Merzs fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).

“Reading Merz spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato’s cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows.” –Nin Andrews

“Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject as if from fragments. A strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality.” –Brian Swann

“Merz world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. Its no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of ‘less is more.’”—Lit Pub

“An artisan of the understatement, a craftsman of finely-tuned precision.” –Neue Zuricher Zeitung

Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Lit.

Dimension: 228 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781945680540