Hans Magnus Enzensberger seems to be almost a parody of the high-profile German intellectual, famous for always being in the foreground when there's a camera or a microphone around, and usually with a political opinion that's at ninety degrees to those of the other intellectuals around him. Inter alia, his legend includes a Quixotic attack on the all-powerful Spiegel and FAZ in the fifties, borrowing Khruschev's swimming trunks and sheltering Baader-Meinhof terrorists on the run in the sixties, and supporting the US side in the first Gulf War.

But that's all short-term stuff. What matters about him is his work as editor of a couple of now-legendary literary magazines and the bibliophile series "Die Andere Bibliothek", through which he was able to promote numerous previously-unknown writers (most famously W.G. Sebald), and of course his gloriously rebellious lyric verse, which has been hitting its targets with precision, fluency and wild originality for well over half a century.

Enzensberger seems to be determined that the "Selected Poems" he leaves for posterity should be his own choice, and consequently he has to keep reissuing new versions of it, updated to include the last two or three collections. I have the "1950-2015" version, which rather oddly seems to have been published in 2014. Logically it should thus have included some poems he was planning to write later, but more prosaically it turns out that it concludes with three new poems not previously published.

There's a huge range of subject-matter and forms, although free-verse predominates. There are poems about current affairs, renaissance painters, the weather, language, love, the author's nose, you name it. And he can find the ridiculous in anything. A superb parody of legal language ("Vorschlag sum Strafrechtsreform") is followed two pages later by an Audenesque celebration of the wonders of shit ("Die Scheiße"). A book everyone who reads German should have on their poetry shelf (only to replace it by the "1950-2020" version, when that comes out, of course!). ( )