Black milk of daybreak

Anselm Kiefer's Margarete - 1981

I love poetry for two principal reasons. One, because of the rhythm it gives to words on a page; the sensuality and vulnerability it can give to the reader, and two, because it makes me feel more at peace with myself -
there are others out there who torment themselves over lovers or who observe the world with the same fascination as I.

My favourite poem in the world is one that doesn’t quite fit this mould. It is Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (Death Fugue). Why is it my favourite? Because it can make me cry like no other piece of literature.

Read well, it is the most achingly painful poem in the world. It is ugly, it is terrible, it is difficult. It is death itself speaking about one of the most awful crimes of modern times, the Holocaust. And it is played out amongst crass words that denote drinking and music and dancing. At the same time, it is beautiful, it avoids vulgarity and it’s delicate and rhythmic.

Paul Celan is one of those men who I wish I had met. You know when people ask you those “which four people would you invite to a dinner party?” questions, and people answer with Elvis, or Marilyn Monroe, or Kurt Cobain, or if you’re a little bit edgy perhaps J.D.Salinger…? Well my number one would be Paul Celan. The man had such a romantically tragic life. He was tri-lingual, he studied medicine in Paris. He was a successful man until the Nazis came to power. Then he was incarcerated in a Nazi labour camp. His father died of typhus, his mother was shot dead. After the war he began to write. He wrote sporadically, until the events of his life were too much of a burden to bear, and he drowned himself in the Seine one spring.

He wrote other poems of course, but none with as much potency as Todesfuge. Nothing that has prompted artists to paint the poems, and nothing that has made a young woman cry quite so painfully.


"Flâneuse"