From Publishers Weekly
In 1999, Sheep Meadow brought out a Selected Enzensberger, as well as Kiosk, a collection of newer work. Both featured magnificent translations by Michael Hamburger, and both brought the poet's tremendous political and lexical force to the fore. Yet each poem of this explicitly lighter-dictioned collection is more like a Liedchen, or "ditty," in that its tone is based on a straightforward, caustic wit, one embodied by ubiquitous, simple declaratives and unreliable-narrator posturings that don't need much care from the translator. Thus this collection of nearly 70 page-length, lyric-like meditations, translated by editor and critic Grimm, renders poems like "Everything Under Control," "Options for a Poet" and "A Glossary of Countries" with a certain clunkiness: "It's a pity about the dragon's domain Druk-Yul/ (extremely few people know her location)/ and about the Republic of Our Savior,/ with her raiding squads now turned gray." Many of the poems involve a cataloguing of useless products and the dupes who use them; others lecture on "Models" or "Semantics," or issue "A Caution Against Justice." But the morality, the deep outrage of the poet behind the poems, is what comes through most clearly, and it works to clear space for a world not unlike the plant whose genus name is "Equisetum": "The horsetail ignores us,/ doesn't need us, discreetly propagates./ In the sloughy ditch it is biding its time,/ simpler than we are, and hence/ unvanquishable." (Apr. 1) Forecast: Last year's children's book The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure was extremely well received on these shores, as wasy Enzensberger's YA time-travel novel, Lost in Time. Curious parents could thus be lured to these wry, infectious ditties.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Enzensberger is perhaps Germany's best-known living poet. Born in Nuremberg in 1929, he has written widely in the areas of literature, social criticism, and poetry (both original and translations) and has even published children's books. He is a bitter critic of postwar society in Germany and is deeply troubled by the careless path his country (and other developed countries) has followed: "Everywhere/ the selfsame razor blades,/ congress members and killer bees." The poems in this slim volume, translated concisely by Grimm, are imbued with an angry irony that is not misplaced, for Enzensberger's concerns are valid. Yet this witty poet tempers his pessimism with lighter-hearted observations: "Behold, my screwdriver/ will last longer than my brain" and "How nice it would be/ to be tenderhearted/ like the fig " Recommended for libraries that collect international poetry. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
