Swan love. Lines and miracles
Swan love. Lines and Miracles is the title of a 2001 collection of lyrical miniatures by the poet Sarah Kirsch .
content
The 240 little poems describe a year in the life of the poet, beginning on "March 20th around noon". Kirsch reports on her everyday life in Tielenhemme , a village on the Eiderdeich, where she has lived in seclusion since 1983. Everyday occurrences under the influence of the changing seasons form the creative center of the texts.
Shape and style
As the title suggests, "Lines and Miracles" are the subject of the book. Kirsch collects highly condensed, short texts, some of which only comprise two lines and mostly do not have a title. In doing so, she decomposes the conventions of the genre, the fragmentary and abbreviated generate a poetics of the small, directed against everything absolute, which is guided by a precise gift of observation. The formal proximity to Japanese haikus and echoes of concrete poetry are evident. The "lines" are sequential , meditative moments that are not subject to any particular order.
Only time is constantly inscribed in the texts. Dates simulate the authenticity of what has been experienced, but this is interrupted several times by dream-like inserts and unreliable memories. The game with facts and fictions is not cleared up, but sometimes driven into myth and fairy tale. Past and present are not separated at Kirsch: the Eider becomes the Styx and people long believed dead are suddenly alive again. The mood of the poems hovers between heavy melancholy and grotesque comedy, dialect and everyday language are suddenly next to neologisms or ancient expressions, some of which are based on baroque vanitas symbolism.
The scene of the texts is the northern German landscape, in which the lyrical self seems to dissolve. Romantic mysticism of nature and a monistic experience of unity characterize the descriptions. The strange things are animated under the pen of Kirsch, the lyrical ego transforms - as in Ovid's Metamorphoses - into animals and plants. Nature also becomes a place of poetological reflections, whereby the boundaries between the self and the world are blurred:
"Bird cloud fingers we
write in the water."
The short verses emphasize the materiality of the letters, which appear on the paper like traces of the described environment.
In addition to the tendencies that can best be described as animism , which elevate nature to a soul space in which the poet is constantly reflected, there is also a lyrical we, which tells of painful separation and a desired union. In swan love, however, people are only ever present as absent. Love and death form the elementary field of tension in the poetic confrontation with nature. For Kirsch, spring is always associated with transience. The volume closes with an epitaph:
"Went in slurry meadows as if it were
almost lost paradise in
March the farmer had
hanged himself in autumn."
A funerary inscription ends the annual cycle. The poems in Schwanenliebe often have a dark, sometimes apocalyptic, visionary tone. The poetic activity becomes, much more so than in the author's earlier texts, a futile mourning work that always testifies to what is announced in the scriptures - the end.
literature
- Beatrix Langner : Northern Meditations. Swan love: New poems by Sarah Kirsch , review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on February 14, 2002.
- Silke Scheuermann : The moonlight is in the keyhole. Sarah Kirsch shows Kopfkino , a review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from November 3, 2001.
- Julia Schoch: There is a smell of elderberry everywhere. Magical essence. In her most recent books, Sarah Kirsch seeks the human counterbalance , reviewed on Friday April 11, 2003.