Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico. She is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on literature. In this essay, Metzger discusses how Sachs's identification with Jewish suffering and representations of genocide are transformed into healing images that transform grief in Sachs's poem.

Nelly Sachs is not the only Jewish writer who has used poetry to try and understand the events of the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry. The Nazi desire to destroy an entire culture and the people who were that culture's literal representations has confounded historians and social scientists since the scale of destruction was first uncovered in the 1940s. The resulting outpouring of literary writing that has dealt with the Holocaust is enormous. Many Jewish women survivors have written of their experiences in prose memoirs...