The Gossamer Wall : Poems in Witness to the Holocaust - Softcover

O'Siadhail, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852246014 ISBN 13: 9781852246013

Publisher: Gardners Books, 2002

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author:

Micheal O'Siadhail was born in 1947. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. A full-time writer, he has published ten collections of poetry. He was awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1982 and the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. His poem suites, The Naked Flame, Summerfest, Crosslight, and Dublin Spring, were commissioned and set to music for performance and broadcasting.

His latest collections are Globe (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), Love Life (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), The Gossamer Wall (Time Being Books, 2002), and Our Double Time (Bloodaxe Books, 1998). Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1992) includes selections from six of his collections, The Leap Year (1978), Rungs of Time (1980), Belonging (1982), Springnight (1983), The Image Wheel (1985), as well as the whole of The Chosen Garden (1990) and a collection, The Middle Voice (1992). A selection of his earlier poetry, Poems 1975-1995, drawing on both Hail! Madam Jazz and A Fragile City (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), was published by Bloodaxe in 1999. The Gossamer Wall received a special recommendation from the judges of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize in 2003.

Review:

The Holocaust was an eruption building up over two thousand years. Our world stood by as ordinary men became mass murderers. The fall-out of this epochal event continues to affect our world. In trying to face the Holocaust, we stand between the last surviving eyewitnesses and a generation often cut off from the past. How does poetry respond to the extermination camps? After them, what hope is there? These poems bear witness to the Jewish trauma and its meaning for all of us. The fruit of many years of immersion in the testimonies of survivors, The Gossamer Wall is a new departure for Micheal O'Siadhail. In this book-length sequence, he evokes the Holocaust in a stark, narrative style of great intensity. --John Felstiner, author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism

This is powerful life-affirming poetry which is by turns urgent, reflective, terrified and loving....These are poems that celebrate life, that confront and revitalize the old themes of love, loss, memory and desire and do so in a variety of verse forms. They are tender, vulnerable and defiant. --Paul Donnelly, Poetry Quarterly Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Gardners Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1852246014
• ISBN 13: 9781852246013
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128