WITH SUCH SIMPLE DIRECTNESS Helga Novak conveys the earnestness of her message, whether it be social, political or human.

Born September 8, 1935 in Berlin, Helga Novak was reared by elderly foster parents in a capital which knew Russian occupation. She studied philosophy and journalism at the University of Leipzig. In 1961 she married and moved to Iceland, where she was variously employed in a carpet factory and in the fisheries. There she assumed Icelandic citizenship, which she still maintains, although she now lives and works in Frankfurt on the Main. In 1965, she returned to the German Democratic Republic to study for a year at the Johannes R. Becher Literaturinstitut in Leipzig. Subsequently, she traveled in France, spent a year in Sicily and several months on the Greek island of Ios. This is Mrs. Novak's second visit to the United States; in 1966, she attended the meeting of the Gruppe 47 in Princeton.

As a school-girl, Helga Novak was a voracious reader of Schiller — he was the only writer of quality represented in the library of her modest home. Later in life she avidly read Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Maxim Gorki.

Helga Novak first published two slender volumes of verse, Ballade von der reisenden Anna (1965) and Colloquium mit vier Häuten (1967). For the second of these she was awarded the Literaturpreis der Freien und Hansestadt Bremen in 1968. Her poems are the products of experience, of fantasy, free of formal tradition, couched in simple, straightforward, often earthy and elemental language: they are devoid of affectation yet rhythmically appealing, “gesagt gesungen.” Postwar Germany, East and West, and Iceland, with its life by the sea, its fjords, and its codfish, provide her with most of her settings. She is inclined to write ballads, some of which appear in rhythmical prose, as do both poems from which these volumes take their titles.