Mirko Bonné

Mirko Bonné Poems

Mirko Bonné Biography

Mirko Bonné (born 9 June 1965) is a German writer and translator. Bonné was born in Tegernsee, Bavaria. In 1975 his family moved to Hamburg, where he attended the Hansa Gymnasium. He graduated from the Otto Hahn Gymnasium in Geesthacht in 1986 and worked as a bookshop assistant, taxi driver and nurse. His writing career began in the early 1990s with journalism, moving on to lyric poetry and translations. In his poetry, influenced by Keats, Trakl and Eich, he treats the themes of landscape, life, and memory, while his prose, which includes novels about Shackleton and Camus, concerns itself with the mechanisms of oppression. He has published travel writing about South America, Russia, China, the United States, Iran, and Antarctica, and translated Anderson, Dickinson, Keats, Cummings, Creeley, Yeats, and Gherasim Luca. He is a member of PEN Germany and lives in Hamburg.)

The Best Poem Of Mirko Bonné

Fallstaffage

Felicita, what a stroke of luck, but what if nothing pleases you
anymore? You don't care for great leaps and bounds
and yet, hardly due, you are a case in point,
from the word go in love with crashing down,
was I not? What a stroke of luck, felicita, an apple.
I hardly arose, and it already struck me:
light, two apples, the incidence of light: that nothing
that wants to fall on its own can be of value.
One falls through the world. Falls further.
Everything falls. So one falls with it. What now?
From case to case I liked playing Fallada
as a little man, as parachutist,
Sir John Fallstaff, at any rate I didn't fall
far from the tree - one is too heavy, falls after
omnibuses, fountain pens, water towers,
fingers deep in fell and all rises, falls,
rye cradled by winds in the valley with rocks and
fallen phalanxes, dun leaves in fall,
falls after everything in its phallic form.
Then tries to be striking, mostly to women,
but for that one has to fall out of the window.
You are my cup of tea, I call after her,
then we fall for a while butterflylike
down the side of the house. Even this house: staffage.
For many times one will fall past it,
the woman, you behind, felicita, but falsely.

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock

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