Nocturne: 111 Poems by Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl is one of the leading figures of the Austro-German expressionist movement in literature during the early part of the twentieth century. Nocturne collects 111 of Trakl's most beautiful and haunting poems, including two newly discovered works. Nocturne offers the interested reader a wonderful introduction to a poet who has not only influenced a great number of poets, painters, musicians, and playwrights for more than a century now, but who is also considered one of the most important voices in twentieth-century world poetry. Trakl's poetry is marked by the perpetual use of nightmarish visions of disintegration, death, and murder, as well as of natural decay. His poems bear haunting witness to a world devoid of faith, meaning, and hope. Truth is what Trakl attempts to detect through his poetry- - more specifically, the fact that one's unconscious horror mirrors the horror we experience in reality as we try to cope with our human condition. Nevertheless, one senses that Trakl still captures glimpses of beauty in this wasteland, a beauty he usually equates with erotic or familial relationships, a beauty that in his view can only be seen in contrast with death and horror.