The book takes the reader through the amazing friendship of these two writers. I found the book to be a wonderful aid while writing my term paper on the works of Nelly Sachs. The book provides a great insight into the lives of these two authors.

One of the rare available testimonies of celan's personal writing. For those who read French, now his correspondance with his wife Gisele Lestrange, is another relevant way to get to know him, it was published two years ago.

A bunch of letters written over 16 years by two nobel-winner poets. It's heartbreaking. Nelly Sachs, "his Li", loved him, no doubt. Her "dearest Paul" was married with a child. It is fascinating to read how two poets process the most common story among people. With tenderness and sadness and so much dignity. And as Nelly Sachs says: "Love is inhuman". This book reveals the sensitivity it takes to write poetry and how this sensitivity marks your every single gesture, making sometimes life to be simply unbearable. "If only I had you here" Nelly Sachs says, and that is what the reader wishes with her. An unfulfilled wish. They met only once and never again. Hard for simple people, even harder for poets. "You are my light" they say to each other and from the third letter she feels he is her home. Did they decrease each others loneliness, or did they make it bigger? It's up to the reader to decide.