One cannot but respond with deep emotion and affection to the anguish and pain one finds in your poems. Granted, words are often unable to express the ineffable; but isn’t poetry the art of transcending words?
Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and author of Night
"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.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
I have received your book of Holocaust poems, and was very moved to read it. You are to be congratulated. -- Martin Gilbert, author of The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War and Churchill: A Life
Louis Daniel Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University the following year.
From 1968 to 1987, while continuing to write poetry, he assisted in managing a 350-person men's-clothing factory in Farmington, Missouri, and started one of the Midwest's first factory-outlet apparel chains. From 1980 to 1991, he taught English and creative writing, part-time, at Mineral Area Junior College, in nearby Flat River. Since 1987, he has lived in St. Louis and devoted himself to composing poems. He has a daughter and a son.
Brodsky is the author of seventy volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-four volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and nine books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, Faulkner Journal, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, 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.
In 2004, Brodsky's You Can't Go Back Exactly won the award for best book of poetry, presented by the Center for Great Lakes Culture, at Michigan State University.
