Kirsch, a well known literary critic and poet who publishes in the New York Times Book Review and NYRB, has created a remarkable document.   By pairing brief poems with striking photographs by August Sander who recorded individuals’ likenesses between 1910 and 1954, Kirsch illuminates the clash between individual free will and history and fate’s inevitability, between society’s definition of one’s role and one’s own ability to break free and express oneself.   Sander and Kirsch, whose lives didn’t overlap, combine to pose questions of inequality, social integration, and the destructive power of war, the final culmination of the world’s ‘tournament of need for power, status, money, beauty, and love.”  The tragic future for the young babies and children in Weimar Germany’s early years and the tragic pasts for those lost and maimed in WWI, are a testimony to the horrors of the 20^th Century.  Kirsch provides little hope for the future in his prose poems and occasional stanza-structured work, though they provide beauty and insight into the past.