Rubble Flora

Rubble Flora gathers fifty years of poetry by Volker Braun, who lived and wrote in the former communist East Germany. Throughout his work he held to the voice of the individual imagination and to a utopian possibility that was never realised.

The collection follows Braun through the upheavals of 1989 and what came after. His poems look at the triumph of capitalism and at the languages of advertising, terror, politics and war. Alongside this runs a sensual attention to the natural landscape.

Many poems take lines from Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Brecht and set them in Braun's own context, where they become ironic comments on present troubles. Taken together, the poems give a stark picture of the last few decades of transformation.