Novemberland: Selected Poems 1956-1993 - Softcover

Grass, Gunter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156003317 ISBN 13: 9780156003315

Publisher: Mariner Books, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Novemberland is a bilingual volume of selected poems from the past four decades by Germany's preeminent contemporary writer. Before Guenter 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.

About the Author:

GÜNTER GRASS (1927-2015), Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer, attained worldwide renown with the publication of his novel The Tin Drum in 1959. A man of remarkable versatility, Grass was a poet, playwright, social critic, graphic artist, and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0156003317
• ISBN 13: 9780156003315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 163