“Departures From Rilke is so many things: reenactments that verge on translation, the choreography of a poetry known so deep in the bones that it dances in the writer’s living room, a sort of thrashing with the original as Steven Cramer wrests Rilke into the 21st century.”
Departures from Rilke
by Steven Cramer
Steven Cramer’s newest book of poems, Departures from Rilke, derives from his favorites among Rainer Maria Rilke’s two volumes of New Poems (1907/08). Cramer repurposes, updates, and sometimes upends the subject matter and style of the originals, often leaving Rilke’s premises almost altogether. A practice dating back to Thomas Wyatt’s imports of Petrarch and including Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961), Cramer’s approach makes for an original poetry of personal and contemporary resonance, while remaining alert to Rilke’s chastening presence.
“Steven Cramer’s Departures from Rilke distills life and society’s difficult areas into palatable, poetic pieces which readers can savor and contemplate. It is personal yet universal, linguistically delightful, metaphysical yet real. In it, Cramer accomplishes what so few writers ever can.”
Nicole Yurcaba, sage cigarettes magazine
“The poems in Steven Cramer’s new book, Departures from Rilke, live within a sliver of space between the living and the dead. . . . Everything about death, dying, and how it brings to the fore life’s “real sun, real woods, very real green” is met with tremulous courage. If we know any kind of loss or grief, we can’t look away from the terribly beautiful, complicated truths of Cramer’s work.”
~Amy Grier, The Hooghly Review
“In this fascinating poetry collection, Steven Cramer’s seventh, the prize-winning poet and essayist . . . vaults Rilke’s work over the intervening century and delivers a selection of poems that are more modern than their originals yet retain Rilke’s intoxicating combination of ethereality and physicality.”
~Ann Leamon, Harvard Review
Steven Cramer
Departures from Rilke is Steven Cramer’s seventh poetry collection. His previous books are The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (Galileo Press, 1987), The World Book (Copper Beech Press, 1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, 1997), Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004)— winner of the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book—Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012), and Listen (MadHat Press, 2020), long-listed as a “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. His work is represented in anthologies such as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Autumn House Press, 2005 and 2011), The Book of Villanelles (Knopf Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012), and The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002 (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). He has also written essays for Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon (Graywolf Press, 2005); Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem (Middlebury College Press, 1996); and Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012). Recipient of two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, M.I.T., and Tufts University; and he founded and now teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
