Gestapo Crows: Holocaust Poems - Hardcover

Louis Daniel Brodsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1877770760 ISBN 13: 9781877770760

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1993

Synopsis

This book, dealing with Holocaust victims, refugees, second-generation "survivors," and today's family, is narrated by an American Jewish poet, son of neither victims nor survivors, who does not presume to speak for the dead but rather to the living -- one human plea for universal peace.

About this title

About the Author:

Brodsky is the author of fifty-five volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-three volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and seven books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University's Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

From Publishers Weekly:

"My ears can almost hear those Jews, / Who, disguised as smoke, as ash, / Losing all hope, / Refused to die . . . " writes the prolific, American-born Brodsky (co-author with William Heyen of Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile ). Unfortunately, "almost" isn't good enough. The Holocaust, viewed by those who did not experience it directly, is not a new subject in American poetry. But in Brodsky's hands, the experience becomes almost trivial: "Wife, dismissing me so systematically, / You might have been a Nazi Storm Trooper"; in a subsequent poem this gentile wife adopts a "nouveau Reich" lifestyle; the narrator of a poem describing the Independence Day holiday has a nightmare in which he sees the German sign Arbeit Macht Frei , or "Work Makes One Free" (originally on the gates to Auschwitz), over his bedroom door. There is not one poem here that conveys an understanding of rhythm, meter or any other tool used to transform rhetoric into poetry. Readers attracted to anything related to Holocaust literature might find this book of interest, but subject matter is a poor excuse for art.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1877770760
• ISBN 13: 9781877770760
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 108