Cirrus@Austlit

'Many of the themes of Neilsen’s excellent Without an Alibi get revisited in this new book, some ten years on. Above all there is the repeated invocation of the natural world as simultaneously a place of danger and a place of imaginative freedom. It is also a world in danger as it is vulnerable to the various processes of reduction: these include obvious things like poisoning and clearing but also the subtler processes of being turned into museum and media subjects. You get some sense of this in the first poem of Wildlife of Berlin, “Marienplatz – Munich” which makes a nice link with the poems of the previous book as well as introducing the sort of material which will figure in this present one. It belongs to a Neilsenian genre that might be called “Recollections of experiences with ex-lovers overseas”. The poet recalls a Munich visit and being lectured to by his partner who tells him that both possessions and regrets are ridiculous. The environment is packed with possessions that humans have taken from the natural world:

. . . . .
'At the Museum of Hunting the stairwells
are studded with antlers and heads, the floors
patrolled by brown bears, wolves and a lynx,
their Waldgeist stolen by some taxidermist . . .' (Introduction)