In a Cabin, in the Woods

A personal perspective on the challenges of living through a global pandemic.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Michael Krüger was suffering from severe shingles and just beginning treatment for leukemia. Because his immune system was so compromised that even a cough would have knocked him flat, he had to stay away from people. He retired to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany, and from there he dispatched his poetic messages. Krüger’s meditations from quarantine were printed for many months in the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and met with an enthusiastic response. In a Cabin, in the Woods collects fifty tableaux of nature, images of the immediate surroundings of a restricted life that also look beyond the horizon. At the same time, these poems look inward to explore transience, illness, and death. Humorous and melancholy, these are studies of the world made with the tiniest compass—meditations on nature and the nature of self that touch us all.