SOURCE: “Poet on a Sit-down Strike,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4816, July 21, 1995, p. 23.

In his review of Enzensberger's Kiosk and Selected Poems, which was translated from the German by Enzensberger and Michael Hamburger, Brady summarizes the poems in the collection and illuminates familiar aspects of Enzensberger's new poetry.

When Hans Magnus Enzensberger's first book appeared in 1957—it was a volume of poems whose title, the wolves defended against the lambs, promised unorthodoxy—he was hailed as Germany's angry young man. It was the first of many, often contradictory labels and it stuck for a while, even though it tells us more about what the critics wanted than about what Enzensberger was actually offering. But it was easy to be seduced by the fireworks. Here, after all, was a young poet adept at sustained tirade, bent—to quote the long title-poem of his second collection, Language of the...