pRainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926 is one of Germany's major Modernist poets, notable for the lyric intensity of his work. He considered the Duino Elegies - a cycle of ten poems written in inspirational bursts between 1912 and 1922 - to be his major achievement. The restless movement of these poems reflects his lifelong struggle to reconcile the dichotomies of joy and suffering, life and death, masculine and feminine, that ruled his life. They remain powerful testaments to Rilke's struggles with the mysteries of existence and the endlessly opening miracle of the everyday. ppbrppAlison Croggon's radical new translation captures the energies of the German poems with an urgent, acute clarity. As she says in her introductory essay 'The turbulent currents that make the Elegies so enthralling are generated by the dynamic contradictions of a mind acutely conscious of its own movements.... The poems are not about life rather, they are a startling mimesis of its instability and transience.' ppbrpp'A