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Darkness Spoken: Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Peter Filkins, Zephyr Press, 2005, $24.95, paper, ISBN 0939010844.
The poetry of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), recently published by Zephyr Press in English translation in an expanded, bilingual Collected Poems, is unmistakably colored by the place and time of its making: the Central European theater of the Cold War. Her most famous poems trace the anxieties of that conflict's earliest years; they confront the stubborn historical amnesia of Austria and the restored Germany with a passionate vituperation. In perhaps her best known poem, 1952's "Early Noon" ("Früher Mittag"), Bachmann depicts a landscape
Where Germany's sky blackens the earth
its beheaded angel seeks a grave for hate
and offers you the bowl of the heart.
"Already it's noon," seven years after the war, and "the hangmen of yesterday/drain the golden cup."
The public, historical world is also present, less aggressively, in the detail of her images-airbases and army maneuvers-and in her rigorous, if oblique engagement with the philosophical issues of her day. (She was, among other things, a highly critical scholar of Martin Heidegger.) But Bachmann's political and philosophical seriousness comes in a strikingly personal voice, a voice palpably confident in...