Customer Reviews

Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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Adorned with a title that sounds like it was borrowed from Enya's last album, Ulrich Baer's derivative pastiche "Remnants of Song" is appallingly preachy and reductive, politically dubious in the extreme, mind-numbingly repetitive, and written in a style that lowers English critical prose to new levels of lumbering inelegance. For something worthwhile on Baudelaire, look at work by Susan Blood, Ross Chambers, Sartre . . . or anyone else, for that matter! "Remnants of Song" raises (lowers?) the bar in the writing-the-disaster department -- my nominee for the 2003 Residual Culture Award.

when i say baudelaire is brought into the light, i mean that his work is described lucidly and criticized empathetically. the author took special pains to understand the conditions in which baudelaire wrote, and sought to bring fresh perspectives to his analyses of the works sited. i agree with another reviewer of this work who commented that his favorite section concerns the sky -- the treatment of the horizon, frames, and clouds is wonderfully clever. as a dancer and choreographer who enjoys using the imagery of poetry i found this to be one of the most helpful discussions of baudelaire's work available to me. i believe this text would be useful not only to students and lovers of poetry, but also to other artists who would like a multi-faceted reading of some very complicated and layered poems. i must confess that i did not read the sections pertaining to celan, because i am specifically focusing my personal research on baudelaire. i cannot speak for the quality of the discussions in the latter half of the book, but i can highly recommend this text to those interested in baudelaire.

In short, this is the best book ever written on Baudelaire and Celan. Baer articulates very complex and subtle ideas, but his prose is clear and inviting. This is for those who are interested in not only these particular poets, but also issues of "memory" and just "poetry" at large. I particulary love the third chapter "Blindness and the Sky" and the fifth chapter "Landscape and Memory." Considering that poetry is on the verge of extinction in our contemporary, it may be urgent to read this book right now.