As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. In Kiosk, his latest collection, he draws on his wide knowledge of the scientific and technical developments of the last half-century, yet comes out on the other side of extreme scepticism - on the side of poetry and poetry's 'negative capability', a kind of unknowing. Though never a confessional poet, he has won through to the freedom to draw on intimate experience too. However disillusioned now about public issues, he remains a poet of defiance, as intelligent, compassionate and trenchant as ever.