To write poetry means to use words sparingly, to reduce stories to their essence in order to stir emotions. With keen observational skills, a good “ear” as well as kind instincts, Dieter Moitzi writes in a personal style that makes you see the world around you in many different, maybe even new ways. His poetry is visual, sometimes sensual, always sensuous: you feel things on your skin, you smell scents, you hear sounds.

He presents you the lonesome wordsmith who sits at his laptop struggling with his fear “… that I will end up lying in my flat, / lonely, unread, unwept, / a cat gnawing my bones, / a longcase clock ticking / eternities away…” He shows you how it feels to move from a popular Parisian neighbourhood with all its “fastness, blurry, and turbulence” to that posh suburb where “even the dogs wear Ralph Lauren”. He invites you to have tea in the Serengeti, under “a lone, archaic baobab that stretches branches / like shrivelled, pleading arms into the balmy breeze”. He evokes those “watermelon days” when “the faint smirk of boredom lurks / between the pages of a summer novel”. He uses the romantic image of a candlelight dinner in Paris only to upend it and make everything feel “like plastic / except the perfectly iced bottle / of ‘Cristal’”.

Dieter Moitzi’s main topics are our lives in this modern world. How we can still pursue happiness in an environment that often feels cold and depersonalized. How we can still find beauty in the grey, rain-splashed streets of a big city. Rummaging through his memories, he explores new ways to see sunsets and moonlit lakes, November fogs and teenage angst, how to deal with a Prince Charming, how to imagine our final moment “when he comes at last, / dust-winged eyeless angel…” and says “in that raspy voice of his, / ‘Are you ready? Time to go!’”

Some say that poetry is dead. Some say that poetry doesn’t sell. This poetry collection shows that to the contrary, poetry is still very much alive, and that its main goal is not to sell. What Dieter Moitzi tries with his poetry is to show you how the familiar, the ordinary, can suddenly look different. He offers you words that live and resound.