The art of Anselm Kiefer is rich with references to writers, philosophers and poets, and his relationship with Paul Celan has been the most complex and intense of these dialogues with the past. Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery - sand, straw, hair and ashes - into the physical reality of his paintings.<BR>Illustrated throughout with reproductions of Kiefer's best-known works, this book explores the intricate web of associations between the poet and the painter, a network that is extended to embrace other artistic and literary figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Joseph Beuys. Through Celan's linguistic innovations and Kiefer's intense explorations of past and present, artistic creation becomes both an expression of horror and an act of commemoration.