[In the following excerpt, Hadas lauds Kirsch's roving imagination and use of metaphor in Sarah Kirsch: Poems.]

Sarah Kirsch has a more developed style and voice than either [Katerina] Gogou or [Thalia] Kitrilakis. I have not read Kirsch in German and suspect [Jack] Hirschman's [translated] “versions” [in Sarah Kirsch: Poems] are insufficiently lyric; still, Kirsch's imagination comes through clearly. Gogou and Kitrilakis are poets of stasis, eloquent on the claustrophobia of a city neighborhood or the slowness of life in a village where “the doctor is an hour's ride / three by donkey, / even there, he's seldom home,” and “the women carrying pails / of milk, or wash, or water” on their heads “cannot turn, and never turn.” Kirsch is very different. Whether because of her own decisive journey from East to West Germany or, more likely, because of the flow of her fantasy, she is a poet of rapid motion, delighting in all kinds of travel and its metaphoric equivalent, metamorphosis. Thus “I'm bound to an airplane,” “I'm crossing Germany white snow / the sky is slashed open,” “I'm a tiger in the rain.”

Kirsch also writes about staying home, watering a garden, writing, just living. One of her most memorable poems ends:

Stretched out the night's finger
picks me out in my own house
smoke's swimming through the empty room
turning into a tree
all foliated with words
words that immediately withered
the little ships swim through the limbs
I no longer climb aboard these days.

(“Night Stretches Out Her Finger,” page 52)

These are not poems of domestic complacency, but neither are they angry calls for political action, as Hirschman confesses in his Introduction: “Her poetry is less noted for its critique of a regime than … for the brilliance of its handling of montagic imagery, … control and unifying of highly disparate elements through a narrative thread of bittersweet irony …” That thread traces a mazy path; the flex and snap of metaphoric energy keep the poems from being routine or monotonous, but tend to preclude narrative except in the more folktale-like pieces such as “When He Has to Go to War” and “The Milkman Littleladle.” My hunch is that some of these are in dialect in the original, songlike, rhyming, with strongly marked rhythms; the translation suggests all this without really conveying it successfully.

Kirsch's work has a Chagallian rootlessness; the poems, like imagination, are not held down by gravity, but the infinitely flexible ties that bind them to earth are nevertheless local in nature—images, language, the texture of a world. Though the essence of Kirsch's work is change, motion, she is a sharp-eyed observer of detail wherever she finds herself. A strength of the book is that no one poem is adequately representative of her range, but a quotable passage is the close of “I'm Bound to an Airplane,” because of its collage of landscapes, its reference to Ovid (beloved of other exiles such as Brodsky), and its almost Stevens-like joy in metaphors for the imagination.

I fly to the seashore Ovid gazed at
many years in exile, he wailed
as this region so definitely beautiful
was only for a poet otherwise imaginary
in this way he found solitude wishing
for a prison-paradise, soon
wrote rich heart-felt songs of praise extolling the Lord
when he died there affectionate to his work friendly
and without success I could
see his grave and for the first time palm-trees
I wanted
to come clean into the snow,
with this “caterpillar” vehicle, my foot
already making tracks I've a mind
to get out look at stones, unpretentious plants, the shoreline
full of light-hearted houses tall
I will also dance and evenings along the sea
I buy a green melon
give it away to the taxi-driver
everything comes true there
one day when I land.

(“I'm Bound to an Airplane,” page 60)

The inconsistent punctuation is annoying, but it does not obscure Kirsch's exuberance. She surely deserves to be better known in this country, perhaps through better translations.