Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) is recognised as one of Germany’s most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry’s free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes’ translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch’s writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch’s poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes.

COVER IMAGE 18. November (detail), 1977, by Sarah Kirsch, courtesy of Random House (Germany).

Prizes

Short-listed for Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015

'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

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 her own expulsion from the Communist Party, and to her permanent move to West Germany. Anne Stokes holds a PhD in German Literature from Ohio State University. She teaches Translation at the University of Stirling and translates from German.