Mortal Diamond: Poems

In this new collection of poems—his most philosophically probing and poetically revealing to date—Durs Grünbein takes us on a spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul and its manifold embodiments across the ages. Addressing us in his own voice as well as through the prisms of Seneca, Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Malebranche, Vermeer, and others, Grünbein subtly and lovingly traces the paradoxes of creatureliness—its joys and sufferings, its resilience and fragility—to remind us of the “mortal diamond from the hands of nature” that is life.