Water works : images et passages de l’eau dans la poésie de Lotte Kramer

Abstract

Born in Mainz by the Rhine, Lotte Kramer came to England with the kindertransport. The Rhine is a central motif in her poetry and in the depictions of her childhood. While the poems are teeming with multiple references to the Rhine, to the sea that she had to cross on her way to England, to the rivers that she became familiar with as an adult, water becomes an overriding metaphorical element which largely maps the imaginary world on which her poetry feeds. Used in the preface of the volume More New and Collected Poems (2015) to describe the surge of poetic impulse, water surfaces again in the poems through metaphors which are often extended and accompanied with visual and sound features. The present article examines the characteristics and issues raised by this metaphorical continuum in this poetry.