Liebesgedichte

Ricarda Huch wrote these poems at the turn of the twentieth century, when Germany was awakening to new voices and new freedoms. As one of the first major women writers in the German canon, she brought an unmistakable urgency to the oldest of subjects: the way love reshapes the self, the way desire and destruction often wear each other's faces. Her speakers move through landscapes of longing, finding in nature and music the only languages adequate to what they feel. These are not gentle poems. They ache. They burn. They celebrate with the kind of joy that already knows sorrow is waiting nearby. The collection traces love from its first electric spark through the deep intimacy that follows, and into the grief that love, too, must eventually become. Huch's genius lies in her refusal to separate ecstasy from pain: in her work, they are the same sensation viewed from different angles. For readers who believe poetry should make them feel something true rather than something safe, this collection offers exactly that.