[In the following review, Davis offers a positive assessment of After Nature.]

After Nature, Sebald's first work, published after his death (but with his imprimateur), is a blueprint of the themes that inform his oeuvre: grief and melancholia; a fascination with the natural world; memory. Invoking Dante as his spiritual guide, Sebald has chosen a representative personage around whom to unravel each cluster of concerns. Mattaeus Grünewald (ca. 1475/80-1528), whose religious paintings illustrate a sensibility to suffering that ultimately enfolds him; Georg Wilhem Stellar, the German naturalist, who, in 1741, accompanied Vitus Bering on his second expedition to Alaskan waters; Sebald himself, whose meditation on his family and early life in Germany illuminates his preoccupation with memory and with the tragic legacy of the modern world. Like the two seekers in whose footsteps he follows, he too ruminates on human kind's place in the universe, and on his relationship to nature.

Each person also represents a phase of European development: Grünewald's sensibility is cast within a religious framework; Stellar's, the exploration and conquest of the natural world; Sebald's, the catastrophes of the industrial world. Underlying each phase is the articulation of violence that has become Sebald's trademark. Grünewald dies of melancholia, and his own femininity ironically distances him from women. Stellar, in a moment of idealism, criticizes Russian authority and learns the difference between nature and society; at his death, virtually by his own hand, “someone took his cloak … and left him to die in the snow like a fox beaten to death.” Sebald contemplates Manchester's industries that reduce its workers to pygmies; they are unacceptable even to a WW I army desperate for recruits. He ponders a family photograph; he wonders how they combined remembering and forgetting to survive the horrors they witnessed under Hitler.

The poems are written in blank verse, the form itself encouraging a fluidity and lightness that enables Sebald to explore his themes in differing moods and voices, giving us an incomparable meditation on life, death, suffering, and nature.