Beware: Apocalypses Ahead

“Kunert’s poems are never declamatory or commanding” Marcel
Reich-Ranicki wrote. “They are enquiries formulated by a sceptical contemporary mind; expressions of disquiet, of restlessness, of anguish.” This year Günter Kunert, one of the leading and most prolific poets of our time, will be celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday. Born on the sixth of March 1929 in Berlin, he will mark the occasion in the only appropriate manner – with a new volume of poetry: an anthology of his most outstanding verses from the new century.

In this volume Kunert stands in the ruins of history’s apocalypses, both major and minor, recapitulating what remains in their wake as he prepares us for the next one – because it’s sure to come.