`Late’ is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger’s much-admired `Variations’, `Travelling’ and `In Suffolk’, it is a narrative meditation in a developing series of short passages. In some of his most musical and subtle lyric writing, it draws together the abiding concerns of his poetry: the cycles of the passage of time, the interrelation of past and present, of continuity and change, in both the natural and the social and historical worlds.

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’.