The Sinking of the Titanic, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (USED)

'A brilliant fantasia on the foundering of western society... Its modernist technique is forcefully and wittily employed by a writer whose concern really is truth' MARTIN DODSWORTH  THE GUARDIAN

'Perhaps the most striking thing about Enzensberger's poem sequence on that patently British event, the loss of the Titanic, is the perfect naturalness of its English. To get a poem across the translation crevasse is impressive enough, but for a German-speaking poet to do the job himself is even more remarkable. Enzensberger's command of idiom is complete' PETER PORTER  THE OBSERVER

'Enzensberger thinks our civilization is as precarious as the Titanic in mid-lantic; he has written a poem in 33 short cantos, elaborating with great verbal inning on this notion. What's more he has translated it from his own original German; his English is as good as most of our native poets'. Readable, re-readable and memorable' SUNDAY TIMES

'It could be an English poem were it not for the fact that English poems are never so argumentative, so public as this... a great poem in the English language... a dramatic and philosophical statement of compulsive power... our emotions and our reason are driven along together as in the best of Brecht. We hear in Enzensberger the human voice amongst human voices, feel the extraordinariness of ordinary men'  GEORGE SZIRTES  NEW STATESMAN

condition: very good (lightly yellowed pages)