The poet and novelist Kathrin Schmidt was born in 1958 at Gotha in what was then the German Democratic Republic. Her poems — with their complex word play, beautifully translated here by Sue Vickerman — reflect thoughtfully on the loss of identity, and the sense of being left behind, since reunification.

Vickerman explores the parallels between the north-south divide in England and the tensions that still exist between east and west in Germany, as in 'The Day of the Drop-Dead Divas':