A journey through a terrain that is intimate and political -

hopefully bitter, wonderfully angry,

tenderly scorching through a charred wasteland.

Ehsan's voice speaks of the political contradictions of poetic language, human desires and our ability to destroy. Ehsan's language is regimented in its sparseness, full of emotion and hitting you in the stomach. What holds these poems together is the poet's journey through the many perspectives of love, boredom and war, children and parents out of reach, violent desolation of human relationships, tenderness and migration. Language itself is an actor in these poems, it delivers, undercuts, translates, mutates, sets sentences and sometimes fails to "deliver the pieces to complete the sentence...".

 

Excerpts from the book:

 

YESTERDAY YOU STRODE                             GESTERN ZOGST

torch-handed                                                      du fackelbehändet
through the woods                                            durch den Wald
today only the                                                     heute erinnert nur
smoke can recall                                                noch der Rauch
the charred branches                                        die verkohlten Äste
the rubble field                                                    das Trümmerfeld
of your footprints                                               deiner Fußtapfen
your track,                                                            an deinen Pfad,

Who would want to                                            Wer möchte diesen
retrace this path                                                  Weg zurückwandern
to behold                                                              um den Graben
the trench                                                             aus dem du
out of which                                                         entstiegen bist
you crawled?                                                        zu betrachten? 

Burnt feathers                                                      Verbrannte Federn
and                                                                         und
thirst                                                                      Durst
are your                                                                 sind dein
memento                                                              Angedenk

Sara Ehsan, born in Shahroud, Iran; has lived in Karlsruhe, Germany since 1986. She studied European Art History, Iranian Studies and Literature in Heidelberg and works as a social counsellor for refugees as well as an interpreter and translator for the languages Farsi and Dari. Since 2004 numerous publications as a poet. In 2011 her first volume of poetry Deutschland mon Amour was published.