Ice Roses

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.

Short-listed for Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation 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 Ingrid Bernstein in 1935 in the East German region of the Harz Mountains, Prussian Saxony. She later changed her first name in order to protest against her father's anti-Semitism. During the 1960s Kirsch studied biology and literature at the universities of Halle and Leipzig and married the poet Rainer Kirsch, from whom she later separated. She published her first poetry collection, Landpartie (Country Outing), in 1967 and went on to publish numerous others. She was openly critical of the East German socialist regime, which led to her exclusion in 1976 from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). One year later she left East Germany. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Japanese. Kirsch is also an acclaimed prose-writer and a translator of children's books into German. In 1976 she was awarded the German international literary Petrarca-Preis prize. Anne Stokes holds a PhD in German Literature from Ohio State University. She teaches Translation at the University of Stirling and translates from German.

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.

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