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Ernst Meister’s “Wallless Space”
Wave Books, 2014
What happens when a “piteously naked” philosopher-turned-poet decides to pursue philosophy in the form of verse? In contrast to the poets, the philosophers look incredibly elegant. In fact, they are naked, piteously naked when one considers the meager imagery with which they have to make do most of the time. Durs Grünbein,
What happens when a “piteously naked” philosopher-turned-poet decides to pursue philosophy in the form of verse? This is the task of Ernst Meister in
Wallless Space, a jarring book of poems in which Meister explores death, decay, and existence in an austere poetic vacuum. Through the book’s three sections featuring a total of fifty-seven untitled poems, each no longer than fifteen short lines Meister probes the philosophy of Heidegger and, to a lesser extent, Hegel and Nietszche.
Emmanuel Moses’s “He and I”
Oberlin College Press, 2009
He and I, translated by Marilyn Hacker.
He and I is in fact a compilation of writings that are scattered across three different books in their original French:
L’Animal (Flammarion, 2010),
Figure rose (Flammarion, 2006). In
He and I, his poems are selected and presented in five sections: “He and I,” “More News of Mr. Nobody,” “Riverbend Passage,” “Études and Elegies,” and “The Music that Sets Him On This Road.” Intertwining different episodic narratives, the sections set out to illuminate complex rapports between “he” and “I” be they merely pronouns, imaginary personages or concrete personalities of flesh and blood.
“Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch”
W. W. Norton & Co., 2009
If Israel had a Mount Rushmore-type memorial for poets, the late Dahlia Ravikovitch would be part of the monument. Although little known to American readers, she is admired in Israel as much, if not more, than Yehuda Amichai and viewed as a canon unto herself. Born in Ramat Gan in 1936, she published her first poem at eighteen and was a constant voice and presence in Israeli poetry and politics until her death in 2005, achieving, for many, the status of a fifth matriarch. When she received the Israel Prize in 1998, the country s highest literary honor, she was cited as a central pillar of Hebrew poetry during the fifty years of statehood.