One terrible aspect of our century is that fantasies horrible as the worst nightmares of writers like Baudelaire and Dostoevsky in the previous century have become literally true, realized in world wars, mass murder, genocide, concentration camps. They have come true in the minds of all of us, and in the lives and deaths of the victims….

Nelly Sachs … escaped from the Germany of concentration camps into neutral Sweden in 1940. [She is] a poet who writes out of a life immersed in the horror of the actual nightmare, the deaths of those who were burned in ovens. Reading "O the Chimneys," one is there. One feels at once that here is a writer who does not make poetry out of material which she imagines from afar. Her poetry is the lived material itself.

Her poems have variety, but they might all be one poem, and each poem seems part of the suffering of her people in the camps, a death which in her imagination extraordinarily flows into the resurrection which is Israel. The idea of the Jewish people so prevails that the lives and the deaths seem aspects of the same consciousness. The history of destruction and rebuilding seems to happen at the same time, to be contained in a single moment of time, which is the concept of "my people."

In "Chorus of the Unborn," the unborn with their hope, the dead with their anguish, the murdered and the builders of new life, seem the same…. (p. 5)

One is scarcely aware, though, of the poet's sensibility as part of the contemporary literary scene. Her poetry is not at all about poetry, still less about the poet. It is, rather, a mouthpiece, the voice of her people, and has a personality only in that it so powerfully and exceptionally represents suffering. And the answer to the suffering is to see it in the light of the history of the Jews as the religious life.

In saying that Nelly Sachs creates religious apocalyptic hymns rather than "modern poetry," I don't mean either to denigrate that other poetry, or to suggest that she does not bring to her almost impersonal suffering great literary gifts, even ones from which literary poets might learn. She has great power and intelligence in exploiting certain aspects of real experience as symbols of metamorphosis. The smoke of the chimneys of the furnaces in which the Jews were burned by the Nazis becomes associated with dust, and dust with the dust on butterflies' wings, and with the sands of the desert….

Nor is this poetry without a background in other literature, especially in Jewish mysticism….

Sometimes indeed she reminds one faintly of contemporaries, especially in the play "Eli," which is a lyric rhapsody of voices of people in a Polish village "after the martyrdom," curiously similar to Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood." Yet Thomas seems fanciful, imaginative, sympathetic; with Nelly Sachs these voices seem torn out of her. The mood is so different that the parallel with Thomas seems coincidental.

One can only enjoin the reader to read this book, because it teaches one to know what of all things in modern history we ought to know about—the nightmare and the rebirth…. Nelly Sachs being a poet of immensely powerful imagination conveys this suffering on another level of thought and experience identification. It is something that everyone capable of reading poetry should understand. (p. 34)