Poems by Paul Celan
One of the greatest poets to ever write in German and among the most indispensable writers of the twentieth century in any language, Paul Celan's poems "embody a conviction that the truth of what has been broken and torn must be told with a jagged grace" (Robert Pinsky, The New Republic). The essential poet of the Holocaust-a Jewish survivor writing in the language of his mortal enemy-Celan spent his creative life prodding language and disrupting syntax. His exquisitely distilled poems are manifestations of a primal agitation-each one a cry of human anguish in the face of incomprehensible suffering.