During their years in exile, Hilde Domin worked primarily for her husband, the archaeologist Erwin Walter Palm. She proofread his writing, translated his academic works and documented his research in photographs.

Through the work of Palm, who followed teaching work and made research and lecture trips, the couple were repeatedly separated for weeks at a time. During these periods they wrote to each other. In her letters, to which, from the latter half of the 1940’s onwards, were also added poems, Domin wrote her husband, whom she called “Monkey”, – she herself was the “Hare” – highly entertaining reports of her daily life, her thoughts and her reading. She suffered from loneliness and increasing estrangement from her husband, however, who was unfaithful to her. While he was away on trips, she felt trapped in an “island-cage”. Her present on Palm’s 39th birthday is a poem that expresses her suffering as a result of the “narrowness” of her life and her hope to return to Europe.

Writing took on a new meaning for her during this period: “If a person is under great pressure, poetry can help her”, she once said. She understood that she was becoming a competitor to her husband, who had literary ambitions of his own. “I can only hope that the day is still far away when I will manage to write a poem that he likes more than his own”, she wrote to a mutual friend in 1952.