Collected PoemsBernhards Collected Poem is a key to understanding Bernhards irascible black comedy found in virtually all of his writingseven down to his last will and testament. Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (193189) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis,