Pierre Joris’ Best Books of 2008

check out pierre joris’ blog where he selected an Omnidawn book as one of his best reads of 2008:

Friedrich Hölderlin | Selected Poems | translated by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover| Omnidawn 2008.

My blurb for the book: “More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age — and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fathom the complexities (the beauty and the terror, the ‘inside real and the outsidereal,’ as the poet Edward Dorn has phrased it) of our own age. In their elegant & fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work’s extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called ‘the drama of Hölderlin’s consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision.’”