`Wild and Wounded' collects Michael Hamburger's shorter poems since `Intersections' (2000). It is published to mark the 80th birthday of one of Britain's leading poets of the last half-century. The dominant theme in these poems is the passing of time - whether referring to the injured swan in the collection's title poem, a tree `surreptitiously dying', or the poet himself, comtemplating

... difficulties with grammar now, with tense,

With mood, with person, case - and, yes, the sense.

As illness, frailty, absence and obsolescence become more pressing to the poet, his poems, by contrast, achieve an enthralling robustness and vigour.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and `Poems of Paul Celan', which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His `Collected Poems 1941-1994' was published in 1995 by Anvil, who also publish his seminal critical work `The Truth of Poetry'. His three subsequent volumes of poetry are `Late', `Intersections' and `From a Diary of Non-Events'.

First published under the title `An Unofficial Rilke', Hamburger's translations have been critically acclaimed for their contribution towards a more complete understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century.

While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the `New Poems' volumes, `Duino Elegies' and `Sonnets to Orpheus'. Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a definitive statement.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and came to Britain in 1933. Among the many authors he has translated from are Hölderlin, Goethe, Paul Celan and Peter Huchel. He is equally acclaimed as one of Britain's leading poets of the period since World War II. Anvil publishes his `Collected Poems 1941-1994' and his subsequent collections.