Novemberland
Subtitle: selected poems, 1956-1993
By: Günter Grass ; translated from the German by Michael Hamburger.
Contributors: Hamburger, Michael.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Harcourt Brace
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng; ger
Number of pages: 163
Subjects: Grass, Günter, 1927-  -- Translations into English
Description: 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.
Notes: English and German.
"A Helen and Kurt Wolff book."