Michael Hamburger is an English poet of recent German ancestry, a fact that makes it easy to understand the unhappy historical consciousness that marks his work. The title of his book, "Weather and Season," seems rather commonplace—until one realizes the importance in it of the two poems, "Homage to the Weather" and "In a Cold Season." The former of these is a beautiful evocation of remembered moments in many places, summoned up by the sudden appearance of bees—"a tide, high tide of golden air"—in a garden. The other is a poem about Eichmann, and about the poet's grandmother who perished in Nazi Germany. The range of Mr. Hamburger's work lies between these extremes.

He is an exquisitely perceptive lyric poet, at his best close in the nature of his talent to Charles Tomlinson, reveling as best he can in each moment's "weather." And he is...