Sarah Kirsch is one of the best-known and most respected poets writing in the German language today. Her rhythms are so distinctive that reviewers, adopting a phrase of Peter Hacks's, have come to speak of the "Sarah-Sound," and she is frequently cited both for the intensity of her images and for the contradictions they present to everyday perception and to conforming habit. As influences on her language, themes, and ideas she and others name Bettina von Arnim; Annette von Droste-Hülshoff; Adalbert Stifter; the Russian poet Anna Achmatova, whose work she has translated; the European and American modernists she and other writers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came to know in the 1960s; older contemporaries such as Johannes Bobrowski and Günter Eich; and the circle of colleagues with whom she has shared public readings since the beginning of her career. Her achievements have been...