Perhaps the pleasure-loving Günter Grass, who is also adventurous in the culinary realm, actually tried to grate a licorice root at some point, but as a poet, this word-obsessed individual has never been a sweet-talker. Nevertheless, his extensive poetic work contains many moving, joyful, and humorous declarations of love. The writer Katja Lange-Müller has selected about fifty poems for this volume. Among them are impressive hymns to hearty dishes and landscapes, odes to language itself, but of course, above all, "pure" love poems with highly disparate tones. Sometimes they sound shy, then bold, sometimes tender, then purely erotic, at times more sorrowful, and at other times exuberant.