The winter in Berlin was long — the snow only stopped covering the city at the end of April — and in the solitude of being a stranger again, after Paris, in a country where, this time, I did not even understand the language, I dedicated myself to reading and I discovered two writers that inspired my latest works: the American David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) — who influenced my string quartet A Failed Entertainment, written in 2013 — and the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy (1942–2004).

The three brief collections of poems by Molloy — who died of cancer at 62, only ten days before her first volume was published by Faber & Faber — represent her journey, told with a touching and at the same time cynical lucidity, through her illness and the destruction of her body. In fact, each poem could be considered almost as a human frame in the process of annihilation.

In the darkness of this transformation, Dorothy Molloy introduces, from time to time, small, almost imperceptible glints of light that give an utterly new perspective to a material otherwise perfectly still. Intent on Resurrection — Spring or Some Such Thing (Berlin, January 2013 – August 2014) is the second of a cycle of pieces — The people here go mad. They blame the wind (2014); troglodyte angels clank by (2015); sotto voce stuff (2015); and more to come — inspired by the words of this writer.

— Clara Iannotta