IN SPRING The snow sank softly from dark footfalls, In the tree-shadow Lovers raise their rosy eyelids. Star and night always follow the dark calls Of the boatman; And the oars gently keep stroke. Soon beside a ruined wall Violets bloom, Turning green the temples of the solitary man. BIRTH Mountain ranges: blackness, silence and snow. Red from the forest the hunt returns; O the mossy looks of the prey. Maternal stillness; beneath black firs The sleeping hands are open w

I first encountered the poetry of Georg Trakl in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Then, in about 1985, I came across an edition of Die Dichtungen in a second-hand bookshop on the Bristol Road in Birmingham. This book, in its blue cloth binding and printed on lovely cream-coloured paper, was published by the Otto Müller Verlag in Salzburg. It was formerly the property of Saltley School library. Given its pristine condition, I couldn’t imagine it having been borrowed