Novemberland

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…