Sarah Kirsch, who died in May 2013, was one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary poets. Having lived and worked first in East Germany, then (following political persecution) in the West, finally making her home in rural Schleswig-Holstein, Kirsch provides a writer’s-eye perspective on Germany’s varied post-war existences. Although rarely overtly political, her poetry, with its free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning, bespeaks her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.
