Home

Images of flight, dispossession, and injury, spanning millennia, in history and myth: Eurydice, frantically fleeing from a god that is stalking her, fails to notice the serpent and dies from its poisonous bite. Landless cottagers in northern Scotland, relocated to less fertile land or forced to emigrate. A young German nobelwoman, educated and gifted, resists the »given«, the »morals of complaisance« of her social status. A maid in Poland transforms into a bird, escaping poverty and the indignities of life. On the northern border of Italy, after being left on their own for months, women refuse to use human language after the return of the men.

Esther Kinsky’s Home is a work cycle made up of seven long, plurivocal poems which, connected by brief, adjoining texts, bring together and crystallise recurring motifs of the violence, injury, and silence related to the overarching theme of flight and refuge. Kinsky finds moving images to illustrate how loss and the desire to start again have always been a component of human existence, providing sources of both hope and trauma.

»Esther Kinsky’s poetic speech approaches the phenomena and contexts with the most extreme precision. It is an exploration of nature and cultural history as a history of violence, it does not just perceive analogies in nature, landscape, and tradition with astonishment but ratchets these analogies up, taking them beyond the familiar…« Beate Tröger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung