Miscellaneous Poet Eva Maria Leuenberger joins the ranks of end-time literature
The Bernese poet Eva Maria Leuenberger writes about the longing to no longer be human and to free herself from collective guilt. Her new volume of poetry "die spinne" is part of a young end-time literature that only sees meaning in the wild.
23.08.2024, 13:18
SDA
"twigs sprout / from your hair; / spider legs, horn / of the new deer. / the cells tremble,/ fractal, / and rearranged. / resin drips from your fingers, / sweet as fir, the needles / mingled in your pores, / entwined. / a chestnut tree blossoms / in the flat ( of the hand. "Perhaps, as Eva Maria Leuenberger describes it, this is how it could be when a person undergoes metamorphoses towards the vegetable or animal and becomes part of nature again as a non-human.
Literary utopias or dystopias like this are currently booming, from the poetry collection "In der Nahaufnahme verwildern wir" by Rolf Hermann from Valais (2021) to the hippie novel "Verwildern" by Douna Loup from Geneva from last year.
In Germany, a new "Prize for Nature Writing" is being awarded, and warning texts by representatives of indigenous peoples are increasingly appearing around the world.
In Western culture, alienation from nature is symbolized by the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. There, Eve tempted Adam with an apple that God had forbidden him to pick. Since then, the human race has been guilty and bears the burden of "original sin".
Religious symbolism
The animal in the title of Leuenberger's third volume of poetry "die spinne" is also a Christian symbol: It stands for the devil and, with its fragile web, for the transience of everything earthly. In five linked long poems, the spider crouches in this web and waits, observing the "you" to whom the narrator speaks. On the one hand, she warns it of the spider's gaze, which penetrates the body like poison needles. On the other hand, she locates the desire for the devilish huntress: "you look at her / wishing you had her arms around your neck".
As in Jeremias Gotthelf's novella "The Black Spider", Eva Maria Leuenberger's new texts also deal with human guilt. However, unlike the pastor of Lützelflüh in the past, the 33-year-old Bernese poet today does not focus on the moral transgressions of individuals, but on the global destruction of the environment: "the streams lie fallow; / the frogs, whose language / is stuck under the stones, / tan in the heat."
Leuenberger's images are strong and physical, as was also the case in her multi-award-winning poetry collections "dekarnation" (2019) and "kyung" (2021). "I examine how the body relates to the outside world," the author comments on her work, "to a concept of time and transience." She writes "to understand the world and time, to get to the essence of existence."
A reference to Gotthelf
For Jeremias Gotthelf, the essence was faith, which gave people eternal life in God after death. For Leuenberger, the essence is the cyclical becoming and passing of all living things, without distinction: "new spiders crawl / climb out of your skin".
In "The Black Spider", the stigmata of the devil's kiss bursts on the cheek of the farmer's wife Christine, countless spiders crawl out and bring misery to the people. Christine later transforms herself into a poisonous spider, is caught and imprisoned in a wooden beam. However, evil is only banished in this way, whereas in Leuenberger's work it dies: "the spiders burst/ like the stars already". In this sense, she also has hope.
Although Eva Maria Leuenberger moves thematically in the new mainstream, her poetry clearly stands out from the stereotypical sound of the literary institutes she has attended. She places the words on pages with plenty of white space in a minimalist manner and gives them rhythmic, repetitive and varying weight.
With phrases such as "It's like this: (...)" or "That's the way it is", she formulates absolutely and prophesies the inevitability of the worst. The ending is all the more surprising: "you will not see the end / and even the beginning / is just a word / the threads flutter. / and yet. / stay here. / stay. "*
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
