O THE CHIMNEYS

by Nelly Sachs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 1967

The poetry of Nelly Sachs, 1966 co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has become well known in recent years, not merely for its power, but because it speaks for a whole generation of Jews in Germany whose lives were changed by ""O the chimneys/ On the ingeniously devised habitations of death/ When Israel's body drifted as smoke/ Through the air."" The transformation is too terrible to be faced very explicitly; lines of hard, heart-breaking reality often dissolve like the smoke of the chimneys into mystic, poetic metaphors, visions of resurrection and meaning. The cremation camps in the opening poems, brutally described, alter throughout the book, progressively reaching toward more cosmic visions in which images are less important than the sense of flux, change, mystery. The book ends with a long ""play,"" highly surrealistic, through which wander beggars, spirits, the dead, the murdered and the murderers. Four translators have worked on this book, and the poems are printed in the original German as well as in an extremely simple, impressive, moving English.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION