Sara Ehsan
Bestimmung
Calling
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

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.