Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grunbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation. Brilliantly edited and translated by the English poet Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast expertly introduces Germany's most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to American readers.

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. A modern poeta doctus, his streetwise, ironic style belies at first the deep seriousness of his project and the emotional resonance at its core. His poems range across the most eclectic of material: from classical sources to quantum physics; from the Anglo-American poetic tradition to contemporary neuroscience; from a philosophical celebration of Descartes to an elegy for Dresden.

The poet Michael Hofmann’s awards for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times), and most recently, the American Academy’s Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.