Abendland (2006)

Abendland is an archaic term for ‘the West’ and translates from the German (roughly) as ‘evening land’. 

Abendland was self-published in print in 2006. The poems in Abendland were all written while travelling in the United States and Europe in the summer of 2005.

From a total of around 70 drafts, in 2006 I put together a small chapbook containing a selection of 20 poems.

I edited and re-published the chapbook digitally in 2012. A further 20 poems formed a companion volume, Abendland II, also published digitally in 2012.  

Prater’s poems flow like the text on CNN, but beautifully.

Derek Motion

Prater might be called a Neo-Formalist, or a satirist or an elegist. Whatever you want to call him, the sharpness & jagged edges of his poems make for a compelling read. He’s an “Outsider” who is happy to stay that way.

Adam Fieled
Image: the original cover for Abendland (2006) featuring a detail from a photograph of cracked concrete taken in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2005.

Abendland (2006)


Yo La Tengo 
Walt Whitman Service Area 
Fir 
Mná 
18 Fields 
Goražde 
Death In Dubrovnik 
The Two Faces of Zlatyu Boyadziev 
Mit Gas! 
Pigtails 
Abandoned Youth Camp 
Pink City 
Käthy Kruse 
Baudelaire in Bruxelles 
Dürer: Innsbruck 2005 
Dachau 
Landschaft (mit Gerhard Richter) 
Another Death Star 
Abendland 
Kunst-Wet 
Alone In An Airport