Selected Poems 1956-1993

G&#252;nter Grasss 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 outspokenness that has characterised his fiction. It is this mixture as Michael Hamburger Grasss most constant and sympathetic translator points out that has allowed him to act as court jester to the post-war German democratic state telling disagreeable truths. <b>Selected Poems 1956-1993</b> encapsulates one of the defining poetic oeuvres of our time.