 Whereas the intersection of literature and science, aesthetics and evolution, as well as the poetic elaboration of the existential experience in the GDR were the main focus of the critically acclaimed first collections of poetry, Grauzone morgens (1988), Schädelbasislektion (1991), Falten und Fallen (1994), since the middle 1990s, and especially since the collection Nach den Satiren (1999), classical antiquity figures prominently in Grünbein's poems and essays.