Lighter Than Air

As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Lighter than Air, his latest collection of moral poems, weighs lightness against seriousness. These are witty, lightly ironic poems on all kinds of subjects, easy in style, engaging in tone, often conversational. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter. This is intelligent and pointed poetry in the tradition of Brecht, humanely political and generously engaged. The poems have the ease and the lightness of real mastery. They are moral in their insistence that human life can be lived well or badly, that it is up to us to choose well and to act wisely. Enzensberger is now writing with an increasing awareness of mortality, yet addresses social and political dangers and evils with undiminished urgency. As if of their own free will, the poems of Lighter than Air reach beyond their author to affect other people lastingly. Their lightness will help that endeavour. They will float.

About the Author :
Hans Magnus Enzensberger is Germany's most important poet, as well as a provocative cultural essayist, a highly influential editor and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. His poetry's social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms often denied by Communist governments; like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. Born in 1929, he grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. He studied in Germany and France, and in Freiburg under Martin Heidegger. He was a founder member of Group 47, a loose grouping of disaffected German intellectuals including Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, generally viewed as the most influential movement after the war. His introduction to English readers came with a Penguin Selected Poems in 1968. His much larger, bilingual Bloodaxe Selected Poems of 1994 covered collections published over 30 years, up to Music of the Future (1991), including The Sinking of the Titanic. These were followed by two later collections, published in English translation by Bloodaxe, Kiosk (1995/1997) and Lighter than Air: moral poems (1999/2002). In Germany he recently published Die Elixiere der Wissenschaft (The Elixirs of Science, 2002), a gathering of his poetry and prose relating to science, followed by collection of 99 meditations, Die Geschichte der Wolken (2003), published in English by Seagull Books as A History of Clouds (2010). His bilingual New Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.