Inge Buck gave the visitors of the book premiere of Jürg Beeler's new volume of poetry "The Birds Return" a wonderful introduction to the author's work. Here you will find a transcript of the prelude to a great reading:
After his last volume of poetry "In other people's rooms" New poems by Jürg Beeler have now been published by Bremer Sujet Verlag under the title “the birds
l return“.
Jürg Beeler, born in Zurich in 1957, studied German, literary criticism and comparative literature at the Universities of Geneva, Zurich and Tübingen. He wrote reviews, essays and travelogues for various newspapers. In 1986 his first volume of poetry was published. After spending several years abroad in Spain and Italy, he has been a freelance writer in Zurich and Bremen for the last 10 years.
"The birds return“. They return with their polyphonic singing, just like the Swiss author Jürg Beeler, who returned via the Alps after a lengthy stopover in the “North German lowlands” and who now lives in Narbonne in southern France.
Be or stay on the move, arrive to set off again like birds returning to set off again. "All those vacations that are at airports begin and end.” A movement between two places, two poles, two ways of life, between languages: German, Swiss German and French.
In Jürg Beeler's poems you can hear many voices - noises, tones, sounds and music - heard and written down in notebooks in southern and northern places: the cry of seabirds and the screeching of seagulls, the litany of cicadas and the humming of mosquitoes over the mosquito net, Music in birches and pines or a fugue by Bach. And even the silence can be heard between two moments, between the times, between the lines, the silence lengthens the moment. "Music comes from silence and ends in it' said Daniel Barenboim. Silence is the space between two sounds, a living space to breathe, to hear, to see. To write.
Jürg Beeler's poems speak of language and words, of working with adjectives and personal pronouns, of the endangerment and danger of words: "People used to be impaled for wrong words."It is about silence and about the mystery that is hidden in the word. "I have never written, / said grandmother, / in the words / there is always a jinn."
While in the award-winning novels by Jürg Beeler - about in Love, said Stradivari or in Solo for a waitress or last in The man who wrote Balzac's novels - the protagonists are already in the title and act in widely intertwined narrative and action fields, the nameless characters in the poems are statically reduced to minimal scope, everyday miniatures behind which unwritten stories are hidden that can open up. Maybe the story of a saleswoman who cleans the empty shelves in the bakery or that of a pensioner who sits on a bench in front of the lock and raises his binoculars. Or that of a beggar sitting in front of the portal of a cathedral.
The change of seasons, cold, rain and heat, summer and autumn runs through Jürg Beeler's poems, and yet it seems to be a standstill or the repetition of time, " as if autumn / or spring / could begin again." Ein Ritornell, in which there are apparent movements and yet everything remains in its place.
The permanent can be an illusion, and yet it conveys reliability, like the stations that remain or like the basil in front of the kitchen window.
