Celan was a Romanian Jew whose parents died in Nazi death camps; he survived and wrote in German, the language of the murderers. "Death Fugue," the collection's centerpiece, is the defining poem of the Holocaust: "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening." Its fugue structure (repeating, inverting, building) enacts what it describes. Celan's impossibility, writing in German about what German had done, became his subject and his torment. He drowned in the Seine in 1970.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.