Humane lyrics braid history and family grief with desire, aging, solidarity
Hamutal Bar-Yosef's lyrics lead into the heart's (and history's) difficult thickets: the familial pull of a vanished bourgeois home in prewar Poland (a longing suckled at the poet's aggrieved mother's breast) or the lost communitarian belonging of an early kibbutz (supplanted by a proprietary capitalist). Bar-Yosef's humane embrace of both the historical and personal makes grief one of her great subjects. The early death of a brother in war, a son dead by suicide, and family members murdered in the Shoah color her life and choices in ways that are understood only partially and after-the-fact. Familial love and estrangement appear retrospectivelyas one ("What It Was About") or prospectively apart ("My Name Goes Before Me") and invariably layered and complex ("What I'll Say to My Mother," "The Cute Little Baby"). Poems celebrate a woman's desire and pleasure, registering them most sharply when lost ("Ode to Love," "Quite Suddenly"). Poems about the losses and anxieties of old age form a sequence unlike any other to be found in contemporary poetry: bracing, honest, and useful. Hearing the voice that "says no more / than necessary to the blind man" as he gets on and off a bus, allowing him dignity and control, is akin to reaching the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Filling Station" "Somebody loves us all." Like Constantine Cavafy and Wislawa Szymborska, she allows a glimpse of holy solidarity, of a time, perhaps some 500 years in the future, where there will be no need for steel doors and bomb shelters.
[Sample Poem]
"A Memory" is translated from the Hebrew by Esther Cameron.
There I disappeared from their sight:
There I was swallowed up in the cool No.
Under my parents' iron bed
on the scratchy floor planks
I ceased to be, I shuttered up; only
the acidulous fragrance of apples in the curls of dust -
There I dwelt with the crates of fruit,
stretched out in the place of freshness preserved forever.
There I breathed sweet absence.
There I silenced my heart from beating.
Who's missing? Who's upset?
Who's guessing-groping-galloping
toward my hidden existence?
What a great astonishment!
Crawling on all fours
I birthed myself to my parents
who weren't looking for me at all.
I raised my head
and I was who I was.
Almost three years old.
外文書商品之書封，為出版社提供之樣本。實際出貨商品，以出版社所提供之現有版本為主。部份書籍，因出版社供應狀況特殊，匯率將依實際狀況做調整。
無庫存之商品，在您完成訂單程序之後，將以空運的方式為你下單調貨。為了縮短等待的時間，建議您將外文書與其他商品分開下單，以獲得最快的取貨速度，平均調貨時間為1~2個月。
為了保護您的權益，「三民網路書店」提供會員七日商品鑑賞期(收到商品為起始日)。
若要辦理退貨，請在商品鑑賞期內寄回，且商品必須是全新狀態與完整包裝(商品、附件、發票、隨貨贈品等)否則恕不接受退貨。
