A late-life, late 1960s Celan straddles the perception and the hallucination that akin to Abraham he must choose between Poetry and his own son. The test is in the asking rather than what is being asked. It is not his belief but the readiness within that belief where the conflict exists. To adhere to the story, to countenance a different ending, to inject the necessary steps into his feet to ascend the idea and the mountain.
In how to spear sleep Nathan Shepherdson has improvised a sequence of poems from a footnote in Celan scholarship. In sparse, anecdotal language, each poem seems extracted via a Beuysian mode of thought-sculpture. Collectively they drift like spores from a different hemisphere across the enormity of their subject.