This is an extraordinary story that I've finally got round to reading. And on putting it down, I felt that I needed to go back to the beginning again to fully digest and appreciate all that it said. 

It's an account of how East Germany's secret police decided to fight the encroaching capitalism through poetry. 

In 1982, the Stasi in East Germany were convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work so they decided to train their own writers.

Once a month, a group of soldiers and border guards gathered in a heavily guarded military compound in East Berlin for meetings to learn how to write lyrical verse.

This is an account of some of the individuals involved, and some of the meetings that were held. Each chapter begins with a one line 'lesson' on an aspect of writing poetry (a nice touch, I felt).

It's written by journalist Philip Oltermann who spent five years studying Stasi files, uncovering lost volumes of poetry and 'tracking down surviving members of this Red poet's society, to illustrate the little known story in which spies turned poets and poets spies'.

I read the book in a constant state of disbelief and struggled, at times, to get orientated in all that was happening. Some characters were more 'present' than others in my reading, too, but this is an astonishing story, and one I will be returning to.