As a poet, May finds himself at a mid-point in time: his parents, as he recalls them, "vanish into death", even as his children, as he contemplates them sleeping, will "vanish into life". For all its elegiac aplomb, this is a collection tense with expectancy.  Here, as in "By a Foreign Embassy," one of many exotic locales evoked in these beautiful poems: "So slowly, the strange becomes familiar,/The seeking mind resting as it seeks."

In a 1997 interview, W.G. Sebald said, "My medium is prose" ("Mein Medium ist die Prosa"). This was a bit disingenuous. From his youth, Sebald had written poetry. His "Poemtrees" were drafted in the early 1960s and until the end of his life, tragically cut short ten years ago this month, he continued to write verse. Still, like Jorge Luis Borges, whom he admired and evoked in his books, Sebald's lyricism found its full expression in his utterly magical prose; his is a taut and hammered lyricism, shot through with the grief of an unsparing eye. In Across the Land and the Water (Trans. Iain Galbraith, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99), a gathering of his unpublished verse from School Latin, his first collection, to poems written shortly before his death (and preserved in the German Literary Archive in Marbach), Sebald turned to poetry for some of his most concentrated utterances. To English readers, Sebald's verse may appear reminiscent of such high Modernist poetry as that of William Carlos Williams whose choppy stanzas and abruptly calculated line-breaks present a possible model; and indeed, one of the poems in the collection is "New Jersey Journey", where "the undeciphered sighs/of an entire nation" may be heard (and anyone who has travelled that ghastly highway, as I have, will know exactly what Sebald meant). But in fact, a glance at the German originals reveals that Sebald, for all the variousness of the influences he underwent, stands firmly in German and Austrian poetic tradition. Consider the little lyric "Nymphenburg" in Iain Galbraith's superb translation:

Hedges have grown
over palace and court.
A forgotten era
of fountains and chandeliers
behind facades,
serenades and strings,
the colours of the mauves.
The guides mutter
through sandalwood halls
of the Wishing Table
in the libraries
of princes past.

Galbraith has skilfully caught the cadences of the original and in doing so, reveals Sebald's indebtedness to a long tradition of German and Austrian elegy; this is not nostalgia but evocation in asperity, akin to the double-edged laments of Georg Trakl, of a past at once illusory and much-cherished. Galbraith provides a perceptive introduction and copious notes; all that the reader of Sebald needs is here.