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Enigma: Selected PoemsStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionIngeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), an Austrian, is considered to be one of the most distinguished German-speaking poets of the years following World War II. As a female poet of the twentieth century, she can have had few rivals for the sweep and force of her imagi-nation. She was born in Carinthia, a part of southern Austria close to the borders of Slovenia and Italy. She was from the first aware of frontiers, and much of her poetry is about place, belonging and not belonging, and about her yearning for a world without borders and above all for a world at peace. Other themes were her fear of a return to the conditions and attitudes of pre-war life and, again and again, the complexity of love -- its emotional highs and the bitter pain when it goes wrong. This collection is called Enigma, the title of one of the poems. Bachmann herself was enigmatic, both as a person and as a poet. Much of her poetry expresses her feelings in a figurative way, the ideas appearing at a tangent to their underlying meaning, and she loved to play with the intermingling of dream and reality. Table of contentsPreface; Introduction: Ride the High Country or "They Went Thataway"; Cowboy Codes: Straight & Pure & All Boy; When We were Young: Nostalgia & the Cowboy Hero; Arms & the Man: The Friendly Gun; Give Me My Boots & Saddles: Camp Cowboy; Tall in the Saddle: Romance on the Range; White Hats & White Heroes: Who Is That Other Guy?; Virgin Land: Landscape, Nature, & Masculinity; Corporate Cowboys & the Shaping of a Nation; Postscript - The Frontiersman (1938); List of Films Mentioned; References; Index. |