Celan's is a poetry of the nonexplicit, the unutterable. It could have sprung fully formed from the head of Wallace Stevens's snow man, for it stems from a consciousness which not only "beholds" but also gives image to the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Celan recreated the German language, evidently picking up where Rilke left off in 1926 (for example in the rose-eye poem "Arrival"). Celan's language—peculiar, idiosyncratic, transformational, at times almost incomprehensible—seems the only one capable of absorbing and expressing a world changed by the Holocaust. His language and poetry issue from the urgent need to communicate, to speak the truth that lies in deeply ambiguous metaphors.

Michael Hamburger's chronological selection [in "Paul Celan: Poems"] spans Celan's entire poetic production…. [Most] American readers know only his poem "Todesfuge," or "Death Fugue."…

Its richly sonic, dactylic lines (spoken by the inmates of...