Category: Lyric Poetry

Those who know Otto Laske as a social scientist, composer, and visual artist will be interested to see at Amazon, that his early German poetry has appeared in a bilingual edition at Frieling Verlag, Berlin, Germany. The translation of the work into English is the author's own; it carries the title 'Silesian Language Smithy'. (Those who know his work more deeply realize that it is his poetry that is the foundation of much of his creative work.) The back cover of the book states: Otto Laske’s poems originate in a lifelong coping with experiences that led him from Silesia and Northern Germany to the United States, and from poetical to musical composition. It is the art of composition that is evidenced by these poems which, in compact form, render the tonality and melody of his internal conversations. Over time, these internal conversations were crafted by memory into verses one will not easily forget. They speak with syntactic, gestural, and musical clarity of a life between escape and arrival. The book's title image is taken from Laske's digital paintings called 'Promise' (Versprechen) and refers to one of the poems in the book. The three commentaries on the poetry found on the... Read More...