SOURCE: Melin, Charlotte. “Landscaping as Writing and Revelation in Sarah Kirsch's ‘Death Valley.’” Germanic Review 62, no. 4 (fall 1987): 199-204.

In the following essay, Melin provides a detailed analysis of Kirsch's poem “Death Valley,” noting its significance as a reflection of Kirsch's role as a writer and her relationship to Germany.

Sarah Kirsch's poem “Death Valley” from Erdreich (1982) recounts the descent of its narrator into the unexpectedly treacherous desert and her reemergence after a cathartic encounter with wild, powerful nature. Its occasionally Mannerist formulations and extravagant imagery elicited criticism, on the one hand, of “solche falschen Zungenschläge” in her work (Heise 4) and scepticism, on the other, that details like the glittering opera house represented “ganz konkrete Erfahrungen,” as Kirsch insisted in an interview (Kogel 16).¹ Curiously enough, Kirsch charts a real trip across the desert, and her heightened descriptions seem to share their imaginative origins with the vivid place names...