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They are nine women with much in common–all German speaking,\nall poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation\nthat was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each\nprovides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on\nlanguage, place, poetry, and womanhood.

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_After Every War_is a book of translations of women poets\nliving in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose\nAusländer, Elisabeth Langgässer, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else\nLasker-Schüler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar\nNick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and,\ntherefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest\noccasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as\nthose of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the\ntime–but with a difference. These poets see public events through\nthe lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions,\nthe bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost\nsoul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer\nordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which\nlife is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the\nreader into them.

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The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes\non the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest\nin the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed\nthe heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her\nexperience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her\nto render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their\nwork and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of\nresilience–of language, of music, and of the human spirit–in the\nhardest of times.

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