Selected Poems 1956-1993

Description

Gunter Grass's international fame as a novelist has tended to obscure his achievements in poetry, but his first book was a collection of poems and he has returned faithfully to the medium throughout his writing life. All his preoccupations - social, sexual, moral, gastronomical - are found there, as is the unique mixture of expressionistic grotesquerie and political seriousness that characterizes his fiction. It is this mixture that, as Michael Hamburger, Grass's most constant and sympathetic translator, points out, has allowed him to act as court jester to the post-war German nation, 'telling disagreeable truths'. Selected Poems 1956-1993 encapsulates one of the defining poetic oeuvres of our time.

G nter Grass, born in Danzig, Germany in 1927, is Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer. He is a man of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.