In the past few years alone, Michael Hofmann has translated a prodigious amount of German lit into English and served as editor of the comprehensive anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry. His witty, wise Selected Poems displays Hofmann’s gift for evoking a sense of place, whether it be a suburban landscape (“The soil was cedar chips, sprinkler heads and ants”) or a ramshackle, anonymous flat (“Six floors up, I found myself like a suicide— / one night, the last thing in a bare room…”).