hand margin deliberately mirrors the eroding effects of the sea on the Suffolk coastline near towns like Dunwich, now partly submerged beneath the waves, the words clinging to the edge of the page like houses to a threatened cliff top, while the text here is itself partly made up of fragments of Sebald’s writing, as if his work had also been subject to erosion. This potential for the quennet to reconfigure text borrowed from literary source material was seen early on by the Oulipo, who have published quennets collaging text derived from such sources, including Queneau’s novels, in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne. At the same time, the straightness of the poem mirrors the often linear nature of Sebald’s perigrinations, though at times, it must be said, the paths Sebald follows are far from straight, and often discontinuous, just as the stories he recounts, while sometimes straight, are just as often tangential, barbed and unreliable, at times branching into pure fiction. While Sebald asserts that the White House at Bredfield in Suffolk where the writer Edward Fitzgerald was born on 31 March 1809 was ‘levelled to the ground in May 1944 when one of the German V-bombs, which the English nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’, suddenly deviated from its course’, the local postmaster confidently assured me that the real cause of damage was dry-rot. Similarly, when Sebald asserts that the train which ran from Halesworth to Southwold ‘had originally been built for the Emperor of China’, a connection which facilitates a long digression on the last days of imperial China, there is no factual basis for his claims. Such findings, and many others, work their way into the poems, which at once retrace and interrogate Sebald’s steps.

Philip Terry, May 2016

143 | AUTHOR’S NOTE