SOURCE: A review of O the Chimneys, in Poetry, Vol. CXII, No. 6, September, 1968, pp. 418-19.

In the following excerpt from a review of several authors' work, Carruth describes O the Chimneys as deeply moving, and notes the influence of the Nobel Prize in bringing Sachs's work to the attention of English-speaking readers.

I shall begin with the translations among the books assigned me, because in the whole range of my assignment, the book that has moved me most deeply, without any doubt, is O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs; a good and generous selection of poems from all her books, translated by various hands. With poetry like this we are hesitant to say whether our response is primarily to the generalized emotional context or to the particular qualities of the poems themselves; but does it matter? Not, at any rate, as much as we once thought. Nelly Sachs...