Against the Stream: Poems by Jo Rippier

This collection of Jo Rippier's recent poetry has been stunningly illustrated by Gerhard Elsner, whose work is represented in major art museums through Germany, and for whom a retrospective is being held in Uberlinger, Germany to mark his seventieth birthday. The poems themselves, show a preoccupation with nature, its seasons, moods, and manifestations. This is nature at the end of the twentieth century. Not a romanticized or abstract view, but much more, an attempt to ask what place nature still has: in poetry, and in a world increasingly dominated by man.