Lighter Than Air: Moral Poems

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.