“Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the
world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with
desperate hope. She’s always biblical to me, not just because the
Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old
psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to
war, though she sees in that son another’s son—a boy killed on
a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to
both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much
needed Psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and
compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first
articulated by Fanny Howe: `Where did the days go? Where to now?’
And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all
the poems in this painful and wise book: `Are my children safe?’
`We will need a new language,’ Back warns. Good then that she’s
giving it to us.”—Kazim Ali “`What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is
Asking,’ and the book itself is the answer: Poetry —this
poetry—is necessary, irreplaceable, urgent. This is the best work
of an important Israeli-American poet, translator, peace activist
and scholar who reminds us, through the courageous beauty of her
poems, that not to be political in these times is to collaborate
with the forces of darkness. And what is political for Back
couldn’t be more intensely personal, as the mother of an
air-force paramedic who suffers from PTSD. Narrating the endless
cycle of violence of her region, Back’s poems protest, grieve,
and rescue language from its political and commercial
appropriations. Throughout she adopts the irreverent tradition of
textual allusion in Jewish poetry, allowing herself to radically
rewrite the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Psalms, and feminize the
Jewish liturgy. This is one of the best new books of poetry I have
read in recent years!”—Chana Kronfeld “Poetry may make
nothing happen, as Auden infamously wrote, but Rachel Tzvia
Back’s poetry makes something delicately yet fiercely come forth:
the grief of mothers, the fear of soldiers, the tenderness of a
younger brother’s hand, the stones and sand against which
cyclamens struggle to flower in Israel/Palestine. This is a poetry
that honors the vast silence out of which and into which we go, and
the silences before and after extreme violence. Drawing on ancient
epic and myth, alert to the rhythms of land- and sea-scapes,
Back’s poems arise from a background of unending war, refugee
crises, the `sea of small feathered/things’ and `of mortar fire
fired.’ These are incantations offered in part to heal a son, to
recognize injury, to sound out grief and guilt, but also to
register difficult flashes of beauty and the presiding elemental
forces of “eastern winds,” sun, moon, season, and sea. Back’s
lyrics are as purposive, stealthy, and precise as the step of the
tutelary cat in some of her poems. Her beautifully spare lines
offer `a narrow bridge and all the world’.” —Maureen McLane
General
Imprint: |
Shearsman Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
March 2019 |
Authors: |
Rachel Tzvia Back
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 7mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
102 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-84861-640-0 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-84861-640-6 |
Barcode: |
9781848616400 |
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