SOURCE: Catanoy, Nicholas. Review of Rückenwind, by Sarah Kirsch. World Literature Today 51, no. 4 (autumn 1977): 613.

In the following review, Catanoy praises the metaphorical richness and technical prowess of Kirsch's verse in Rückenwind.

Poets, like photographers, may be divided between those who put sharp edges on life and nature and those who prefer soft focus. Sarah Kirsch belongs with the best East German poets—those who view the world as if through an impressionistic eye.

There is a mild elegiac tone in Kirsch's new volume of poetry, Rückenwind, a quality that shapes her sentiments in much the same way that the laws of nature dictate the beauty of crystals. The book includes occasional verses in which Kirsch delights: a meeting with a Yugoslav writer, a summer night in Potsdam, a holiday in Wiepersdorf. Some are simple, at times even stately, like one devoted to the sunset: “Kastanien...