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Wulf Kirsten was born in Klipphausen in 1934. Klipphausen, which is near to Meissen in the German state of Saxony, was at the time a rural, and rather feudal, community. His father was a stonemason and the family also had a smallholding. The wealth of experience which Kirsten has from his rural childhood gives his poetry a truth similar to that of Clare’s.

   Kirsten’s poetry is both lyrical and documentary, observing the worldvery closely and particularly. He dislikes being called a ‘nature poet’, because he cannot write about nature in general, just the places he knows, with their particular histories. He loves to give a detailed account of all that he sees and does not shy away from using words from his childhood or local dialect, even if they would be unknown or unusual to some urban readers. The baker's peel that ‘shoots over the ember hole’ in ‘Unforgettable Moment’ would be a rare sight in any Western European country today, as would the windrows in a field in ‘Mecklenburg Summer (1959)’.

   Like Clare’s, his poetry could never be idyllic. He was old enough to experience the war, the cruelties in his village and the terror of the
Russian advance. His poetry and other writing has always been political. He has researched and written extensively on Buchenwald concentration camp and his poetry has dealt with other concerns with as much openness as his East German citizenship allowed. The catastrophe that was East German farm collectivisation is present in his poetry, in ‘A Feast for the Eyes’ and in the date of the more elegiac ‘Mecklenburg Summer (1959)’, which looks back to the year before the collectivisations of 1960. ‘Flats on a Sunday’ gives us an uncomfortably expressive document of forced flat-sharing in a time of housing shortages.

   However rooted his poetry is, Kirsten is very much an internationally aware poet. He has travelled widely in Europe and his poetry reflects this. The prose poem ‘Luchian’ was inspired by the paintings and biography of the Romanian painter Luchian and his paintings’ titles are collaged at the start of the poem. Kirsten’s collected poems, Erdlebenbilder (Pictures of Earth Life), which was published in 2004 by Ammann Verlag on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, is testament to the full scope of his poetry. These translations first appeared on www.litrix.de.