"Rubble Flora: Selected Poems" introduces a major German poet to the English-speaking world. This selection of poems by Volker Braun spans an extraordinary half-century of poetry (1963 2013). Born in the former East Germany, Braun is a humane, witty, brave and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. He might be said to have found a truly singular voice amid the colossal upheavals of 1989: exploring the triumph of capitalism and the languages of advertising, terror, politics and war. At the same time, he is a sensual poet in tune with the natural landscape. Like most writers, he has his own touchstones in world literature, and many of his poems set quotations from Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Brecht into his own context, where they work as ironic illuminations of a present plight. The literary principle of his work lies in the friction of these different voices, whether cast into free form, collage or classical verse. Cumulatively, his poems offer a searing vision of the here and now.

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