"Of the three postwar writers whose work seems most clearly to answer to Adorno's sense that no poetry can be written after the Holocaust, it is Eich (Beckett and Celan are the others) whose refusal of rhetoric is most thorough, with the result that the speaker--the authorial presence--whoever it is who would have persuaded, blamed, or badgered us, seems to have vanished into thin air, leaving nothing to come between ourselves and the pure experience offered by the poems."--Belle Randall, poetry editor, "Common Knowledge"

"This is an extremely important book. Gnter Eich is a highly significant German poet and Michael Hofmann is the master translator of contemporary German literature--both poetry and prose--into English. These pieces of Eich's are powerful, bitter, and compressed poems in English, and they will enlarge the landscape of postwar German poetry for Anglophone readers. Eich and Hofmann meet in blessed conjunction."--Rosanna Warren, author of "Departure: Poems"