In "Poem for Jenne," which opens Jacqueline Osherow's ambitious and
challenging new collection, a neighbor has planted larkspur and
delphinium in the poet's yard and is tending them hoping to bring
color and light into a household stricken by personal tragedy. As
the bright blue, star-shaped flowers bloom for a second time, the
poet writes, "earth's reaching for her heavens, I for words / or
any chink of rapture I can claim." The pervasive theme, in this
poem and throughout Whitethorn, is that human suffering may be
irremediable, yet in nature and language one may find a key to
unlock the mysteries of sorrow. Osherow searches for that cipher by
exploring a range of suffering, from the personal to the historical
and cultural. In the poem "Orders of Infinity" she visits Treblinka
and, in her inability to count the stones or quantify the real loss
of the Holocaust, ponders the impossibility of imagining the unborn
generations of the victims' descendants, an infinity of lives not
lived, "undreamed daydreams, mute conversations, ungratified
indulgences, failed hints . . ." In Whitethorn, a book of enormous
scope and emotional intelligence, Osherow unflinchingly examines
the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the
greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.
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