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Die Wiener Lyrikerin Dr. Melitta Urbancic (1902-1984) musste aufgrund ihrer jüdischen Herkunft 1938 ins Exil gehen. Das Schicksal führte sie und ihre Familie nach Island, wo sie bis zu ihrem Tod wohnhaft blieb. Das Dichten war ihre geistige Überlebensstrategie, die Existenzphilosophie Karl Jaspers'ihr philosophischer Lebensfaden. Als Konvertitin war sie fest im katholischen Glauben verankert. So sah sie sich gerüstet, um mit den Erfahrungen des Exils ihr neues Land bewusst anzunehmen. In Island fand sie – ohne ihre Heimat zu verges-sen – eine persönliche Form der Integration, eine nicht ausgrenzende, sondern einschließende Lebensform der Bikulturalität. Melitta Urbancic war literarisch von Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George und Friedrich Gundolf beeinflusst. Stets blieb sie einer Poetik der traditionellen Vers- und Reimform treu.

In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile—permanently, as it turned out—at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia later, the agonized, witty, vivid, nostalgic, and often slyly malicious poems he wrote at Tomis remain as fresh as the day they were written, a testament for exiles everywhere, in all ages. The two books of the Poems of Exile, the Lamentations (Tristia) and the Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto), chronicle Ovid's impressions of Tomis—its appalling winters, bleak terrain, and sporadic raids by barbarous nomads—as well as his aching memories and ongoing appeals to his friends and his patient wife to intercede on his behalf. While pretending to have lost his old literary skills and even to be forgetting his Latin, in the Poems of Exile Ovid in fact displays all his virtuoso poetic talent, now concentrated on one objective: ending the exile. But his rhetorical message falls on obdurately deaf ears, and his appeals slowly lose hope. A superb literary artist to the end, Ovid offers an authentic, unforgettable panorama of the death-in-life he endured at Tomis.