Unrecounted

W. G. Sebald and the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp were friends from their schooldays. Unrecounted combines 33 of what Sebald called his "micropoems"-miniatures as unclassifiable as all his works-with 33 lithographs by Tripp. The art and the poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialogue. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak." The lithographs portray, with stunning exactness, pairs of eyes: among them the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust, Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald, and Sebald's dog Maurice. The poems are anti-narrative, epiphanic, and brief as haiku. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home.Sebald, W. G. is the author of 'Unrecounted', published 2005 under ISBN 9780811215961 and ISBN 0811215962.