Reprisal

Michael Lentz's new poems are literally about everything - an A to Z from childhood to death. At the centre, not coincidentally, is a poem about a child who found a dead blackbird. And both, the child as well as the poem, want to make the bird sing again. Again and again, Lentz's new poems indulge in the creative, vital power of language, drawing on all registers and ranging from prayers to anagrams. The result is a mixture of the Baroque and Romanticism, combined with cool Modernism, which encompasses all of our existence.