SOURCE: Haenicke, Diether H. Review of Landaufenthalt, by Sarah Kirsch. World Literature Today 53, no. 1 (winter 1979): 108.

In the following review, Haenicke discusses how the personal is related to the political in Kirsch's Landaufenthalt.

Among the relatively few lyrical voices to be heard in East Germany, that of Sarah Kirsch is a particularly powerful one. Her first poems appeared in the late sixties; in the early seventies of her work became known to a broader audience when several of her books of poetry appeared in a West German publishing house. The volume Landaufenthalt is a collection of poems many of which were published before. It comprises the poems of an earlier (1967) East German edition with the same title. Some of the poems were previously published in Kirsch's Gedichte (Langewiesche-Brandt, 1969). Several poems in this latest volume, however, appear for the first time in a West German edition.

All of Sarah Kirsch's...