Novemberland: Selected Poems 1956-1993

Before Gunter Grass's First Novel, The Tin Drum, received international acclaim as one of the most important postwar novels ever written, Grass was renowned in his native country for his poetry. Informed by the same baroque inventiveness and mordant wit that characterize such celebrated prose works as The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, and The Flounder, these poems depict a landscape at once recognizably mundane and grotesquely surreal. Half-mad women lament over the ruins of Berlin; nuns on a beach resemble the Spanish Armada; scarecrows multiply in a field; two bitten apples recall Paradise; handmade coffin nails are recovered from a bulldozed graveyard; a glove washed up on a beach prophesies our fate; gale winds portend a storm of neofascism. Even as his poems give provocative, often searing, moral commentary on issues and problems of the moment, Grass's inventiveness and spirited humor lift his work above and beyond the cant of political poetry. Novemberland offers his startling, at times harrowing, vision of Germany - and the world - in the aftermath of the Second World War and Cold War.