Diderot's Cat

"If the recent German Zeitgeist could speak, it might sound a good deal like Michael Kruger", Richard Dove writes in his introduction to Diderot's "Cat", the first comprehensive selection of Kruger's poems in English. The poems are drawn from thirteen collections published over the last two decades of uneasy peace and momentous change.

Michael Kruger was born in Saxony in 1943, grew up in Berlin, and has lived for more than twenty years in Munich. Although a prose-writer, publisher, essayist and critic of note, and also the editor of the important German literary magazine Akzente, he is best known in his own country as a poet.

The Swiss writer Adolf Muschg calls Kruger "a well-disguised mystic... a scribe who has got beyond books, to the point where the wisdom of masters begins-the absurd wisdom which writes its final word on water. It would not be entirely wrong, either, to call Kruger a master of the love-poem, a first-rate painter of landscapes and climates, a reviver of the Roman Elegy, a painter's poet. But he is all these things with a difference: there is a 'remainder' which-in rational terms-should not exist, which one will only discover if one is not looking for it and which is...
everything".