Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Midstream

Released from history: a unique and riveting anthology of holocaust poetry.

Article Excerpt
Blood to Remember. American Poems on the Holocaust Charles Adds Fishman, Editor, Time Being Books, St. Louis: Missouri, 2007. 637 pp., hardcover $42.50, paper $27.95.)

History is never over. Unique events like the Holocaust that live under the collective skin of humanity, emerge full blown through sensibilities of artists. In the American literary canon, slavery, its witnesses gone, continues to wield a transforming power through poets like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Rim Dove. The Civil War lives through Whitman and Emerson. After World War II, Randall Jarrell in "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" forces us to grasp the essence of man's encounter with evil.

Charles Adds Fishman's riveting edition of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember reverberates with felt history. Two hundred and forty American men and women writers, many separated by decades from the Shoah, speak from diverse ethnic histories, age, and race. In the preface to Blood to Remember, Charles Fishman discusses the new organization and augmentation of his anthology. In a departure from his earlier edition, he lists the poets alphabetically. Fishman explains that he chose the new structure to permit readers to locate "their own favorite poems and poets more easily ... to allow the material gathered to generate its own unanticipated links and points of departure."

In this anthology, a reader will discover over a hundred pages of organized rich historical and personal references: a "Glossary" where recurring words in the poems are well defined; a portion called "Notes to the Poems" where authors reflect on how their poems were generated. Then, in a startlingly intimate and moving section, "Poets' Statements," the authors themselves speak of their connections, witnessing, remembering and imagining the Shoah.

"Biographical Notes" serves to further distinguish the individual poets. Many poets are newly published. Others like May Sarton, Marge Piercy, Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, Philip Levine, Alicia Ostriker, and Marvin Bell are renowned. In this edition of Blood to Remember, Fishman's expanded anthology is enriched by its...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!