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Winter Music

Selected Poems

Sarah Kirsch

Translated by Margitt Lehbert

Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (112 pages)
(Pub. Apr 1994)
9780856462344
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Sarah Kirsch was a leading East German poet before leaving in 1977 for West Germany, where her work was already highly regarded. While she had supported many of the political and social aims of the Communist government in the GDR, she had been active during the 1960s in opposing the restrictions of the official creed of social realism, by writing poetry concerned with private emotion and individual perception. She has been the recipient of many literary awards, including the Austrian State Prize for Literature and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, and is today considered one of the most eminent German poets.

    In her close, stylish versions of Sarah Kirsch’s poems, which combine fluid movement with abrupt dislocations of syntax, and in her choice of poems from all phases of her work, Margitt Lehbert demonstrates the qualities which make Sarah Kirsch’s poetry so original and compelling.

    Sarah Kirsch
    Sarah Kirsch was born in 1935 in Limlingerode and studied biology at the University of Halle. Her poems first appeared in East German magazines in the early 1960s. In 1976 she joined eleven other writers in protests against the expulsion from East Germany of the singer-poet Wolf Biermann. This led to ... read more
    Margitt Lehbert
    Margitt Lehbert was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to German parents in 1957. She grew up in the United States and Germany, studied in Konstanz and Iowa City, and translates into German as well as English. In 2006 she founded Edition Rugerup, which publishes mostly poetry in translation. She lives in south ... read more
    Awards won by Sarah Kirsch Short-listed, 2015 Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize   (Ice Roses)
    Praise for Sarah Kirsch 'Sarah Kirsch is a poet of rare power and invention, who rather like Akhmatova can evoke a relationship in crisis with a few lines of dialogue. Direct and lucid, always lyrical, she finds music in the cadence of speech and the hesitations between words. It is a great fortune that these German poems have found a translator who can honour the shape of the originals, while writing them afresh in English.'
    Elaine Feinstein
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