Michael Krger was the director of the Hanser Verlag from 1995 until his retirement in 2013. He has published many volumes of prose and poetry. Joseph Given is a Berlin-based literary translator.
Seasonal Time Change: Selected Poems, Kruger's latest book to be translated and published in English, presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger's poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet's world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature's unsentimental image. --Rain Taxi