Shining Sheep

Shining Sheep opens with a single word in white text on a black page: “Lumière!” It’s a rousing beginning to an uncommonly inventive collection. Ulrike Almut Sandig’s surreal, incisive, playful poems are translated from the German by Karen Leeder, whose nimble versions keep pace with the dives and swings in theme and style.

Harlequinesque language lets Sandig approach topics too raw to broach head on: “when she tucks me in her breath smells blue: / blue like bruises, blue like korn. my ma rules // on a dark-blue bouncy castle beyond the moon / and cries that no one tells you what it’s like / to be a mum.” Tautological delights like “last night / i was / woken up / because […] without reason / i was / awake” invoke Wittgenstein (“when I came home I expected a surprise, and there was no surprise, so of course, I was surprised”). Soon, though, the trope of awakening darkens: “because a / a part of my body / was hurting,” then “last night i was woken up because / everything was hurting.” This is just one example of how the ludic never fully obscures the larger world.

Shining Sheep’s cast of characters keeps the collection’s ambit porous. The book includes a suite on Omid:

the little man inside my head, he had
seven sons. the first was at the bus stop
when a drone attacked. the second blew
himself up. the third counted to a thousand

as the teacher’s throat was cut. the fourth
stayed at the coast, took a job smuggling
his own people. the fifth fell out of the boat.
his youngest sons don’t understand the words

of the little man […]

“The Songs of the Radio Tower,” a verse drama evocative of Alice Oswald’s Dart, stars motley Berliners whose utterances swerve from clipped to lyric. One exhortation could be directed at the poet herself:

keep on turning, metallic girl
but don’t turn my words inside out.
shine for me instead as a sign

that even in this light completely ripped to pieces
there’s someone’s still here, someone to bear witness