The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

Starred review from November 1, 2018
The biggest surprise of this book may be its size, including 1,050 pages of poems. More than half weren't collected in German during Brecht's lifetime; in English, only posthumous selections have appeared. Translators Kuhn and Constantine explain that Brecht (1898-1956), best known for his plays, wrote poetry virtually daily from age 15 to his death. He preferred song forms; many of his poems are in ballad meters, and many more are in the metrically varied forms of operetta and Tin Pan Alley, complete with fitting rhyme schemes. The rest comprise sonnets and free, unrhymed forms, most of which are definitely rhythmic, waiting for the reader's imagination to set them to whatever tune feels right. A great number were written with theatrical performance in mind and a point to make, so they had to be immediately accessible to listeners, and therefore to readers. This immense book of poems couldn't be less obscure or difficult?not that they lack subtleties, especially of voice. Brecht was for the have-nots against the haves, the workers against the bosses, socialism against capitalism. The poetry of protest?against war, fascism, prostitution, poverty, cruelty, and callousness?has no finer practitioner, whose work these formally faithful translations make almost as powerful in English as in German.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)