The Vocation of Poetry (Winner of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction).

Winner of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction. In a sequence of rivetingly personal essays, Europe's premier contemporary poet and essayist, Durs Grünbein, reflects on his own evolution as an artist and on the meaning and importance of poetry for life in general.

"What counts is the one, unattended second, the moment of inspiration that can never be forced and that decides all. It gives the beginning, it sets in motion the production of sense. The poem is the literary form that most purely captures this moment of inception. I might even go so far as to say that poetry is in large part born from the desire to start over as often as possi⁠ble ..."
(Durs Grünbein)