études

études is a diary-like sequence of poems by the Austrian experimental poet Friederike Mayröcker, written in her late style. Its subjects include longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief and flowers. The entries come almost daily, and they show how desire and the urge to write interact. Mayröcker writes both to keep a vanished world present and to use that presence for constant experiment.

Each poem carries a date, and each date seems to give her licence to include anything: notes on doctor's visits, carefully structured elegies, and obsessively repeated fragments of memory that return through the whole book like a recurring melody. The poems study how the mind moves from fragment to fragment. They also experiment with repetition, typography, collage and quotation, turning the page into a space of radical openness. For Mayröcker, a poem is that which opens everything up.

The volume lays bare the private process of writing, crossing the boundaries between literary forms and balancing playfulness with serious inquiry. Critics have linked her work to modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, with Beckett and Thomas Bernhard also among her influences.