Still Some Light in the House

Still Some Light in the House is the most recent poetry collection by Switzerland’s 2024 ＂Grand Prix Literatur＂ prize winner, Klaus Merz.

Klaus Merz, a consummate master of the short form, captures the wonders and travails of aging in the alpine countryside reflected in these Taoist influenced poems and prose poems, which have been sculpted by the aging artist with every single word dutifully and carefully considered. Questions of mortality and the afterlife are considered and reflect in the forests, along the creeks and rivers, the mountains and in the blue sky stretching above.

Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Holderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust, Unexpected Development, Helios Hauls and firm.

Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, journalist, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation; his translation of Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue: Selected Poems, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature.