Freie Verse

A bibliophile poetry collection featuring 19 previously unpublished poems. Sarah Kirsch is known as a poet of poplars and grasses, of summer winds and barn swallows, as a nature poet in the emphatic sense, who teaches her readers to see and marvel anew in free verse. Those who have considered Sarah Kirsch an apolitical poet should also learn to see and marvel anew. For she was by no means apolitical. This is demonstrated by a fortunate discovery of nineteen completely unknown poems, created during the GDR era. They reveal the Büchner Prize winner as an eminently political voice, free from the constraints of rhyme and thought, unbound by political patronage. The selection volume "Freie Verse," edited by Moritz Kirsch, the poet's son, contains ninety poems in which the idyllic is far away, but the historical context is close and present in every seemingly harmless line. In this volume, Sarah Kirsch's poetic invocation pertains not only to nature but also to the human environment, the societal system that shapes us and – whether we want it or not – follows us to the farthest corners of the world. Of particular value in this context are the nineteen poems recently rediscovered in the attic. It was evidently political, rather than literary, reasons that led Sarah Kirsch to withhold them at the time. In light of the unpublished works, entirely new facets can now be revealed in her already published oeuvre. Far removed from the rebellious, agitational tone of a Wolf Biermann or the assertive gesture of a Volker Braun, the poet finds her own unique form and imagery in grappling with her present, with the respective system, and those in power.