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.