review
‘The Glaciers are Melting While We Fall in Love’ examines the place of glaciers in the Western literary imagination, moving from early accounts of polar and Alpine exploration to Romantic poetry and on to contemporary climate writing. The book combines science, travel writing, poetry and cultural history, structured around journeys to glaciers across Europe and beyond, each one approached through the layers of writing already attached to it. It draws on 250 years of writing and art inspired by glaciers, including women sliding across glaciers in crinolines and heeled shoes in earlier centuries, and present-day burial rituals for glaciers that have disappeared entirely.
The book opens by following the long tradition of writers and artists who travelled to glaciated terrain and were shaped by the encounter, with particular attention to women whose contributions to this tradition have historically been overlooked. It then moves into specific regions and ideas: a water library in Iceland, where glacial meltwater is archived as a record of what is disappearing; the ways Arctic and other indigenous communities have expressed glacial retreat in creative and spiritual terms; and the developing field of ecological grief, concerned with what it means to mourn a landscape within a single lifetime.
Balzer sets the historically male-dominated canon of exploration writing, focused on conquest and the sublime, against the losses now unfolding in the same places, from rapid melting in Greenland and large-scale ice-shelf collapse in Antarctica to projections that the Alps will lose their glaciers entirely by 2080. She gives similar attention to the Romantic and post-Romantic poetic lineage, where glaciers appear as a proving ground for the imagination in the work of writers including Shelley, Byron, Goethe and Coleridge. Balzer also highlights women writers of the same periods whose accounts of these places went largely unrecorded at the time. The final section turns to contemporary poets, artists and indigenous voices responding to glacial retreat in the present day.
The text concludes by considering what role art and writing can play beyond elegy, treating the act of making something from loss as itself a form of resilience.
Balzer’s work invites comparison with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s oeuvre and Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines, which approach environmental subject matter through close attention to place and loss, and with Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, for its blend of travel, science and literary history.
Find out more: https://www.aufbau-verlage.de/aufbau/die-gletscher-schmelzen-wahrend-wir-uns-verlieben/978-3-351-04286-8
All recommendations from Autumn 2026