Charting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary
of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises.
Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close
family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent
now as when Willhelm Müller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle
with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed
his song cycle of the same name, based on Müller's poems. The poems here
become an "assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in
contemporary Europe..." and a commemoration of those making music and
poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately
life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.