«The dog crossed the street and trotted towards me wagging his tail. His movements were graceful and measured; the wagging tail said he knew me. He didn’t seem a stray. Rather, he had a wild air. I threw him a potato chip, he licked it off the sidewalk without violating his dignity.» Hot days, dog days, the outskirts of a German city. Abandoned lots, dumps, skimpy clumps of trees, empty buildings. A solitary, reticent young woman used to looking at herself in the mirror and now haunted by her recently dead mother, wanders in the hallucinatory landscape when, unexpectedly, a dog appears by her side. He’s black and mysterious, with an elegant build and movements. She can’t get rid of him; he chooses the young woman as his person with determination and, from that moment on, becomes her faithful and often menacing shadow. He imposes his rhythms and animal needs on her existence, and she becomes more and more rarefied and cerebral, almost immaterial, which sets off a subtle conflict in which attraction and repulsion, emotional involvement and furious detachment alternate. Marion Poschmann’s language is a masterpiece of irony and the most intense and highly imaginative lyricism; it dismounts the idyll of a romantic landscape and puts it back together as an absolutely modern scenario which brutally mirrors the disintegration of the contemporary human habitat. But if a lawn in her eyes becomes a punctilious listing of botanic terms, if on the supermarket shelves a threatening heap of merchandise looms, and if human relations are reduced to a neighbour’s brief waffling or rare, insipid chats, among the interstices of reality, the ancient and vital fluid of myth still circulates. Just a step away from desolation, poetry rears its head and behind the unexplainable and unexpected nearness of a black dog, the luminous star, Sirius, shines in the sky.