32.4 Fall
Poems of a Lifetime of Passion and Grumpiness
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Stanley Moss’s Almost Complete Poems
Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_danoffd/)
Universality found in idiosyncratic poetic visions, styles
Before the Door of God
Edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson
The Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems
by Greg Miller
Once in the West
by Christian Wiman
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry edited by Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman. Review by David Danoff.
Without a Claim is a book of leave-taking and transience, filled with poems about loss and decline, poems that look at the world intently but refuse to cling or assert dominion.
The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
Imagine the ancient artist, before the tribe has gathered, putting aside his charcoal crayon or horsehair brush, chewing lumps of an ochre-rich clay, and spitting it in bursts through a narrow reed, to create a fine mist of color capturing the silhouette of his hand against the wall. Was it a kind of signature?
In Sacred Trash, husband-and-wife co-authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, who met while working on the editorial staff at Tikkun in the late 1980s, have produced a fascinating hybrid — part historical adventure, part bibliographical paper trail and scholarly prospectus, and part poetic meditation.