When Günter Grass's "Tin Drum" was published, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said it was a dish on which reviewers would gag for a decade. Grass's poems, available to Americans for the first time in [Selected Poems] are the dessert. The free-wheeling German romps with gusto through the brambles of his imagination, sticks his tongue out provocatively, or bewilders his audience with an innocence that is only slyly feigned.

The poems are as iconoclastic as the novels, but tamer—they shock by juxtaposition and gaps in continuity rather than by Rabelaisian disregard for sensitive readers' stomachs. Grass's more notorious personal fetishes from the novels (worms, eels, floating corpses) do not appear in this selection, but the more genteel (chickens, cooks) do….

Grass has said his poetry was influenced by Rilke, Garcia Lorca and Ringelnatz; little of Rilke is discernible, but a touch of Lorca's daemonism is there, with a...