Alright. So I am borderline obsessed with Rainer Maria Rilke. (Someday I am going to write an involved post about him/that - today is not that day.)
Also, as I have mentioned, one of my favorite things is when my favorite creative types like my other favorite creative types. (Favorite!)
In addition, I highly enjoy well-designed books and particularly book covers. (Hey, writer friends: hurry up and write some books and have me design them for you.) I often enjoy spending time in book stores just looking at books (yes, hanging out with me is a blast).
So anyway, you can imagine how pleased I was to find this:
A newly (new as in 2009) "gift edition" from New Directions of poems from Rilke's The Book of Hours with a preface by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my favorite sci-fi authors!! Joy!!. It is wee (6" x 4") and aesthetically pleasing (cover design by Ben Wiseman / Rodrigo Corral ).
Le Guin's preface is very nice:
"With The Book of Hours, written between 1899 and 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke came of age as a poet. He was ready to do the difficult thing...The images of the great later works began to gather cloudily around him. And his voice was taking on its utterly characteristic ring. Now he wrote lines that nobody ever could write but Rilke - those lines that seem to burn through language as if it didn't matter which one they were written in."
Ah! I wish I could read German!
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