SOURCE: Terras, Rita. Review of Ich Crusoe, by Sarah Kirsch. World Literature Today 70, no. 2 (spring 1996): 394.

In the following review, Terras notes Kirsch's hopeful and resigned tone in the poems of Ich Crusoe.

The last words of the last poem in Ich Crusoe echo and confirm what Sarah Kirsch had predicted nearly thirty years earlier in “Der Baum,” the first poem in the volume. Swinging in a tree and looking out at the shores of a body of water, the lyric persona is not unhappy. She does not complain about her situation but, at the same time, is confident of being able someday to cut loose from the confinement of tree and rope: “Ich hänge zwischen Stricken im Baum / … / … ich schaukle / … / … sehe / zwei Ufer meins und das andere / … kann los von Baum und Strick.” At age sixty the poet writes again about swinging. In her poem “Entfernung” (“Distance...