In Rush of Wingspan, Eleonore Schönmaier writes of persistent vanishing. Figures disappear into the bush, into darkness, into water; the poems themselves often seem to hover at the edge of erasure. This atmosphere deepens as the collection increasingly turns toward questions of cyclical and disruptive forms of ecological precarity. Forests that once offered refuge and wonder are reduced to ash. Fire, drought, and environmental exhaustion recur insistently, though Schönmaier resists apocalyptic rhetoric in favour of intimate observation. “And who / would have guessed in spring / that by July we would dance / for no other pleasure / but rain?” she asks. Elsewhere, drought is bodily and psychological at once: “a thirst / that creates dry riverbeds of worry / as creases in our foreheads.”

Schönmaier writes with remarkable clarity and restraint about memory, landscape, music, and duration. While her poems rarely overstate, they build to statement; they accumulate through fleeting impressions, textures, and carefully observed moments that linger long after the lines themselves end. 

The poems move fluidly from forests and bicycle paths into concert halls and rooms containing pianos, imbricating natural and artistic forms of resonance. There is something distinctly musical in Schönmaier’s pacing and lineation: a languid, patient attentiveness that allows her slender lines to echo and reverberate. These are precise, generous poems that trust small moments to carry immense emotional and psychological weight. Her work reminds the reader that perception itself – watching clouds shift, hearing rain arrive, feeling wind against skin – is a form of transport, and a form of endurance.mRb