The Inner Sky

Selected work from the modernist poet thematically centered on our relation to the physical world and our minds, featuring original texts and translations.The Inner Sky is a selection of poems and prose by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, set with the original text and a translation, and including more than a dozen works that have never before appeared in English. The translations, by the NEA and PEN Awardwinning author and translator Damion Searls, are lively, moving, and appealing, and they give a new voice for Rilke in English: mystical but concrete, like Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Searls's selection of texts clusters around a handful of related images and ideasbirds and trees, giving and receiving, working and waiting, girlhood and gardensand presents a coherent vision of how we relate to the outer world and inner world of the imagination. Scholars and students of Rilke will benefit from the German and French...