Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Sch�neberg district of Berlin on December 10, 1891. She fled the Nazis on May 16, 1940, and took refuge in Sweden, where she was granted asylum. Her career as a poet started only after her emigration, when she was nearly fifty years old. Despite her relatively short writing career and constant struggles with mental illness, Sachs's body of poetry is one of the essential artistic testimonies of the twentieth century. She died in Sweden on May 12, 1970.
Probably more people know of Sachs as a Nobel Prize winner and the namesake and inaugural winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize than actually know her poetry, which is a pity. Though she wrote from an early age, she became a noted poet only after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1940, and the verse dating from that time-clear, sharp, and penetrating as splintered glass-stands as a powerful indictment of the Holocaust without carrying the burden of sounding topical. This book, a full-length poem considered one of Sachs's key accomplishments, is here translated in its entirety for the first time. Elegiac in tone, the poems capture the exhaustion, the pervasiveness, the sheer terror as Sachs recalls both what she left behind and those still there ("But silence is where the victims dwell-"). The writing is quietly assured, the tension palpable. VERDICT Little of Sachs's work is available here (only one collected and one selected volume appear to be in print), and this volume would serve as a bracing introduction to readers unfamiliar with her poetry and as a refresher for those who are.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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