Publisher's Synopsis
Heinz Winfried Sabais's poetry first appeared in English translation by Ruth and Matthew Mead in 1968. Reviewing Generation and other poems in Tribune, Richard Burns wrote: 'Whether he is concerned with public statement or private emotion, Sabais reveals himself as a commanding spokesman for individual conscience and personal commitment.'
The People and the Stones includes most of the poems collected in the earlier book, together with two long political poems written in the 1970s - 'Agenda' and 'Socialist Elegy' - and a selection from the posthumously published Self or Saxifrage, a sequence of autobiographical and historical poems written shortly before his death in 1981. Sabais's distinctive gift lay in presenting the conflicts of the post-war German experience without self-pity, his style is fully conveyed in these translations by a poet of his own generation who has 'on occasion been surprised to find myself writing down things which, even allowing for the ventriloquist's-dummy aspect of translation, I might have written myself.'
