"Few English poets of our day can have come to their craft with the cultural and linguistic richness of Michael Hamburger."—Stephen Romer in Agenda

For many years the Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll was a friend and admirer of the English poet, critic, and translator Michael Hamburger. After Hamburger's death in 2007, he determined to compile a "Reader," giving representative selections from Hamburger's varied writings. His choice illuminates the breadth and depth of Hamburger's concerns, spanning autobiographical writings, interviews, poems, German translations, and a range of critical essays on writers from Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Trakl to T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and other moderns and contemporaries. It is a unique compendium of a wonderful writer's essential work.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and moved to Britain in 1933. He published many books of poetry, several collections of essays, a classic study of modernist poetry since Charles Baudelaire, The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography. He translated from, among others, Johann Wolfgang con Goethe, Freidrich Hölderlin, Rainer Mari Rilke, and Paul Celan. His awards included the Goethe Medal of the German Federal Republic for services to German literature and the European community's first European Translation Prize for Poems of Paul Celan, now in its third edition. He died at home in Suffolk in 2007.

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) published nine collections of poetry, a book of essays, two collections of literary quotations, and Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. He received numerous honors and awards both in Ireland and the United States.