Norway Poems And Three From England

Author: Kurt Schwitters

Translator: Damion Searls

Publisher: Staircase Books (2025)

“As whimsical and profound as it is brief, the original power and pop of this collection of poems comes back to life in our time thanks to Damion Searls’ deceptively light touch.” — Anton Hur

“Kurt Schwitters was one of the great avant-garde artists of the twentieth century. A collagist of physical and linguistic detritus, he invented his own brand of Dada. Ever a child at play, he saw the nonsense of common sense, and built his poems from the sights and sounds of ordinary language combined in extraordinary ways. In my library, he stands alongside Gertrude Stein and the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. Damion Searls has selected and wonderfully translated some poems Schwitters composed in Norway, where he fled from the Nazis. Searls also includes (and playfully translates into German) three of Schwitters’s translingual experiments—pieces composed in the UK after escaping the Nazis again, in his unabashedly imperfect learner’s English. What a beauty this book is!” — Eugene Ostashevsky