DINGFEST/THINGSURE

The Berlin-born English poet Hamburger seems the perfect translator for the linguistically demanding poetry of Austrian Jandl (b. 1925), whose concrete sound collages--with their wordplay, nonsense, and repetitions-celebrate (as the title poem suggests) themselves as verbal artifacts; it's the sort of childlike abstraction that grows quickly annoying in any language, though the full German text is here to judge as well.