"The poet/orders language/in short sentences/What is above is the/poem itself," writes Ernst Herbeck, the great and sad poet who, born in Stockerau in 1920, was admitted to the Lower Austrian State Mental Hospital Gugging near Klosterneuburg in the late 1940s. Encouraged to do so as a patient by his psychiatrist Leo Navratil, he wrote hundreds of notes and poems over the years. After his first publications at the end of the 1970s, they made him an exceptional phenomenon in Austrian literature, admired as a poet by colleagues such as Ernst Jandl, W.G. Sebald and Gerhard Roth. To this day, this singular work has lost none of its mystery and power in its harsh conciseness and wondrous laconicism. This selected volume presents "what is beyond" in fascinating abundance. The more than four hundred texts are supplemented by numerous.