Selected Poems

In over 40 years' work, German poet and cultural critic Enzenberger has captured the complex interlayerings of public and private realities, ultimately testifying to their difficult inseparability, their conflicts and contradictions. The product of the contrary forebears Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn, among others, Enzenberger's poetry is a complex fusion of dramatic satire and meditative verse, quietly fixed on structures of oppression and coercion. Enzensbeger proceeds with intense, incisive portraits drawn as though by an inverse Whitman--the Pensioner, the Employee, the discreet Detective. This painterly method is often coupled with sometimes jarring transformations of figures and contexts, used not for the sake of aesthetics but for invoking moral consciousness, as in the early ""Poem about the Future, November 1964"": ""Two men appear on a tractor/ (Chou En-Lai is in Moscow)/ Two men in stone-grey overalls/ (Nobel Prize-winners in evening dress)/ Two men with slender sticks/ (gold medals from Tokyo)/ at the wayside amid yellow leaves/ (the dead guerillas of Vietnam)..."" The dangers of piety and self-righteousness are avoided by generous doses of self-indictment; Enzensbeger is a master of deflating senses of middle-class accomplishment, his own often foremost among them. The later work, particularly the new poems of Kiosk, gives way to a more philosophical, forgiving tone where observations and speculations on nature, evolution and mind are given freer reign: ""the thought/ behind the other thought./ A pebble, ordinary,/ homogeneous, hard,/ not for sale."" The translations by varying hands are consistently clear, capturing the sharp, spare style. (The Selected includes the German.) Though the forms and focus of this poetry change over time, its intent and integrity remain consistent, as do its richness and clarity. (Nov.)