Celan was born in Bukovina, a German speaking region of Romania, in 1920, and died in Paris in 1970, when he threw himself into the Seine. Both his parents had perished in a Nazi labour camp, though he escaped, and lived in France for most of his life. His poetry, written in German, is extraordinarily compressed, highly allusive, though, as be himself insisted, not hermetic. He took as a constant theme the subject of the Holocaust, which makes it difficult to judge the purely poetic quality of his work, although at least two poems, Psalm" and "Tenebrae", are undeniable masterpieces. Michael Hamburger, who provides an enlightening introduction, has done heroic work in translating these intricate, always moving poems. Penguin are to be congratulated on putting Celan into their Twentieth Century Classics.