Porcelain

Porcelain is a cycle of forty-nine poems, written over more than a decade, that mourns Durs Grünbein's hometown of Dresden, destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. It is both a history of the city and a declaration of love for the place once nicknamed the 'Florence on the Elbe'. The poems blend eyewitness accounts, family memories, stories, monuments and relics. They follow the city's fate through a series of biographical puzzles, trace its close tie to the 'white gold' of porcelain that built its fortune, and reflect on what poetry can and cannot do. The tone is musical, fractured, ironic and elegiac. The book is also controversial, because it sets itself against what Grünbein calls the 'myth' of Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. Yet it never loses sight of the horror inflicted on a civilian population that did not see it coming, or of the devastation that looms so large in German memory. This is its first publication in English, in a translation by Karen Leeder, issued on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the firebombing. The edition adds new images, notes, Grünbein's own reflections and an extra canto. The poet's effort to piece together the fragments of Dresden's memory is likened to kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics.