The first poem in Gottfried Benn's first book, Morgue (1912)—written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after, or so the poet claimed—with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn's subsequent work. Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often hostile fate, the harsh, sometimes callous voice of the poems relented, softened, and mellowed. The later Benn—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. With this new collection of poems selected and translated by Michael Hofmann, Gottfired Benn, at long last, promises to attain in English the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.