Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the major modernist poets in the German language, notable for the lyric intensity of his work. He considered the Duino Elegies - a cycle of ten poems written in inspirational bursts between 1912 and 1922 - to be his major achievement.

Twenty years in the making, Alison Croggon’s inspired new translation captures the energies of Rilke’s poems with an urgent, acute clarity. ‘The turbulent currents that make the Elegies so enthralling are generated by the dynamic contradictions of a mind acutely conscious of its own movements,’ she writes in her afterword. ‘The poems are not about life: rather, they are a startling mimesis of its instability and transience.’

‘Alison Croggon’s transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies attempts the extraordinary… Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides her relationship with the original poems. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these Elegies and makes them glow in translation… This is an incendiary work.’ - John Kinsella

Printed en face with the German text and with an afterword and notes by the translator. Preface by John Kinsella.

‘Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.’ Australian Book Review

‘Croggon’s poems offer something intense, difficult and fragile, but simultaneously intimate and hugely rewarding in the reading.’ Cordite Poetry Review