The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff: Vol. 1, 1918-1936 - Hardcover
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrants. He was an original, a blood-and-bone New Yorker who walked the city's waterfronts and breathed the life of the Jewish tenements into a lifetime of remarkable poetry. Black Sparrow Books is proud to publish his complete shorter poems - all of his poetry except the book-length works Testimony and Holocaust - scrupulously edited, with notes, by Seamus Cooney.
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From Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Charles BernsteinCharles Reznikoff (1894–1976) is the quintessential poet of New York City and one of the key figures in Jewish-American poetry. A writer of astonishing insight and unsurpassable charm, his poems endeavor to make visible much that usually goes unnoticed, from the piecework of factory laborers to scraps of paper floating in air. Like my father, Reznikoff was born around the turn of the last century to Yiddish-speaking immigrants, grew up on the Lower East Side and lived all his life in the city. Reznikoff made a strong start on the immigrant's road to upward mobility, graduating from NYU law school. But he never practiced law, preferring to work at a variety of mostly editorial jobs in order take on the full-time task of creating a new urban American poetry. Though he lived a very quiet life, Reznikoff was an aesthetic radical: he rejected the conceits, symbolism and metrics of the verse of his time in favor of a direct engagement with the materials at hand, the stuff of everyday life, which he noted in a spare language that, against all odds, takes on mystical resonance. His disarming poems, some just a few lines long, present incident after incident, observation after observation, averting commentary or conclusion so as to leave space for the reader to come to terms with the experiences presented—an aesthetic he articulates in a poem from 1934: "Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish."Like his comrades in poetry, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Reznikoff moved American writing away from fixed moral and literary core values and toward a multiplication of perspective and condition. Reznikoff's is a poetry of listening and recognizing, of dialogue and difference, that holds up today with remarkable force. His platform as a writer of verse, as he once called it, can be summed up in a poem from the years immediately following WWII, in which he takes in the double loss of both his immigrant generation coming to a New World and the Jews left behind in the old one: "Not because of victories/ I sing,/ Having none,.../ but for the day's work done/ as well as I was able;/ not for a seat upon the dais/ but at the common table."Reznikoff's engaging, powerfully evocative poetry has been steadily gaining a passionate following. This definitive edition of his poems (which augments and supplants an earlier version) will be welcomed both by old and new readers of his work.Bernstein's most recent work is Shadowtime, based on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin. He is Donald T. Regan professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Review:
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Reznikoff is unsurpassed in conveying the sense that the world is worth getting right. -- Joshua Clover, New York Times Books Review, January 22, 2006
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- PublisherBlack Sparrow Press
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 1574232045
- ISBN 13 9781574232042
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages445
- EditorCooney Seamus
- Rating
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