A spare collaboration between W. G. Sebald and artist Tess Jaray: short poems, aphoristic fragments, postcard-like miniatures and visual meditations set beside Jaray’s geometric images.

This is Sebald in a compressed register — not the long drifting architecture of Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn, but something closer to a notebook of afterimages: travel, memory, death, domestic objects, scraps of address, sudden jokes, small ghosts. The poems often feel almost too slight until they catch; a line sits there plainly, then turns into an absence.

Jaray’s images give the book its other half: grids, structures, architectural surfaces, optical fields, patterns that feel both elegant and quietly destabilising. Together the poems and images make a book about perception, displacement, correspondence, and the melancholy comedy of things noticed too late. Very much for Sebald completists, readers interested in writer/artist books, concrete-adjacent poetry, visual poetics, European modernism’s afterlife, and anyone who likes books that feel like they were found in a drawer rather than published in the ordinary way.

Very rare. First published in 2001 by Short Books Ltd, London. Text © W. G. Sebald 2001; images © Tess Jaray 2001. Paperback. Good second-hand condition.