From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
My Blue PianoAt home I have a blue piano.But I can't play a note.It's been in the shadow of the cellar door Ever since the world went rotten.Four starry hands play harmonies.The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.Now only rats dance to the clanks.The keyboard is in bits.I weep for what is blue. Is dead.Sweet angels, I have eaten Such bitter bread. Push open The door of heaven. For me, for now -- Although I am still alive -- Although it is not allowed.Else Lasker-SchülerIn her moving and essential new book, After Every War, the Irish poet Eavan Boland has gathered together and translated the work of nine German-speaking women poets, all of whom wrote in the decades surrounding World War II. The title comes from the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who notices with a kind of wry domestic wisdom that "After every war somebody must clean up." The poets in this collection recognize the hard personal truths -- the intimate consequences -- of warfare. They are both witnesses and participants. Some of them I've known and admired for years, such as Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), whom her friend Gottfried Benn called "the greatest lyric poet Germany ever had." Others are revelations to me, such as Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), who is represented by a single devastating poem ("Spring 1946"), and Rose Ausländer (1901-1988), who sounds the ground note for the book with her poem "Motherland":My Fatherland is dead.They buried it in fire I live in my Motherland -- WordThese poets -- the others are Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943), Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974), Hilde Domin (1909- ) and Dagmar Nick (1926- ) -- were all deeply shaped by the cataclysm of World War II. Boland has chosen a small but crucial selection of their overall work, a kind of personal anthology, that shows them to be war poets with a difference. The difference comes from being both poets and women, with all that entails."I had to do it -- suddenly, I had to sing./ I had no idea why," Else Lasker-Schüler cries out in her poem "In the Evening": "But when the evening came I wept. I wept bitterly."These poets have a particular angle of witness that comes from powerlessness, from being vulnerable, injured, marginal, excluded. Most were exiles. Several of them were Jewish, which means they suffered the Holocaust. Dispossession is a key theme. They recognized what they had lost. "I am one who cannot live among my own kind," Bachmann declares in "Exile." "A stranger/ always carries/ his native land in his arms," Nelly Sachs observes in "If Someone Comes."Here is Hilde Domin's "Exile":The mouth dying The mouth twisted The mouth trying to say the word right in a strange language.There is something deeply compelling, as Boland puts it, "in the way the world of the public poet encounters the hidden life of the woman in these poems." The interplay is endlessly fascinating. I'm struck by the personal way these poets confront history, test and interrogate language, especially their mother tongue, question the efficacy of poetry, and repeatedly defend the importance of private feeling. They are dark elegists who view large historical events through a focused individual lens. Their voices seem to me as necessary today as when they wrote in the aftermath of World War II.Here is Rose Ausländer's transfiguring elegy for her mother, "My Nightingale," which now takes its place, along with Else Lasker-Schüler's "My Blue Piano," on my shortlist of the most radiant mid-20th century poems.My NightingaleMy mother was a doe in another time.Her honey-brown eyes and her loveliness survive from that moment.Here she was -- half an angel and half humankind -- the center was mother.When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be she made this answer to me: a nightingale.Now she is a nightingale.Every night, night after night, I hear her in the garden of my sleepless dream.She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.She is singing the long-ago Austria.She is singing the hills and beech-woods of Bukowina.My nightingale sings lullabies to me night after night in the garden of my sleepless dream.By Edward Hirsch Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Ireland's recent history has had its share of violence, so it should come as no surprise that Boland, its most prominent woman poet, is drawn to the poetry of other women who have survived war. In an excellent introduction to her collection of postwar German poets, Boland questions the characterization of war poetry as masculine and argues for a category of "after-war" poetry that articulates what Boland calls "that bleak landscape that follows war" and that is an important part of women's literature. "Women are not usually war poets," she admits, but then contends that that is because "they are not primary agents of conflict; they do not sign or violate treaties." Some of the poets she translates are well known--Rose Auslander and Nelly Sachs--but most are obscure: Elisabeth Langgasser, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schuler, Ingebord Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Dolmin. In her spare translations (the originals also appear), Boland offers windows into a desperate search for hope and meaning amid horror. Impressively, these poets find that hope, often in the beauty of the natural world: "I was injured on this earth," says Lasker-Schuler. "Ask the moon--he will answer you. / Though overcast, he kept an eye on me." This is a stirring, moving, and, unfortunately, timely collection. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
They are nine women with much in common--all German speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood. After Every War is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after the war. Several of the writers are Jewish and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the time-but with a difference. These poets see public events through the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the reader into them. The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of resilience--of language, of music and of the human spirit--in the hardest of times.

About the Author
Eavan Boland is a poet and writer. Her most recent book is "Against Love Poetry".

FROM THE PUBLISHER