Winterreis

Charting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm M-ller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on M-ller''s poems. The poems here become an "assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe..." and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.