Customer Reviews

Kaddish and Other Poems: 1958-1960 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kaddish is Ginsberg's second most important work. This edition contains all of Ginsberg's best pieces from the late Fifties: Kaddish, Poem Rocket, Death to Van Gogh's Ear!, and The Reply. Get this book and the Pocket Poets edition of Howl and you will be all set to enjoy Ginsberg.

"Kaddish" is Ginsberg's memorable and moving autobiographical poem about his mentally ill mother and his troubled relationship with her. This long poem is a sort of elegy written after his mother's death, and after recounting his feelings and incidents in her life, he gives his farewell. Another poem I really like in this collection is "At Apolinaire's Grave."

Ginsberg's long-form poem about his mother is a beautiful elegy in the form of an ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. It examines the poet's relationship with Naomi Ginsberg and her illness, as well as his own childhood and adolescence.

From the russian girl coming to America in the early 1920's, the socialist mom, to the mentally ill patient in her old age, Ginsberg reviews the life of a remarkable woman and the ways in which their relationship affected his life and work. And affected it did. Kaddish is also a therapeutic work for the poet, almost psychoanalitical at times, a courageous and loving exploration of the profound influence parents can have on a writer's life.

If ever there was a trip through hell as mental illness, this is it. Ginsberg relates the story of his mother, a schizophrenic, and how her struggle shaped his life more decisively than anything else. Written as a lament, it vividly evokes her weird symbolic behaviors, her noises and smells, her struggle with demons. He wonders if she wanted to have sex with him, what it means, how the experience stamped him. This was more horrible, I am sure, than even a gifted poet like him could describe. He even states that, when he tries to make love with a woman, he sees her in his mind. Pretty strong stuff.

Recommended. This is the deepest Ginsberg and the best of the beat writing, in my opinion. But is only the horror, in my reading.

I carry this collection with me literally everywhere and read at least a poem or two from it every day. I feel the poems in this collection are beautiful and charismatic, and sadly the style he used in these isn't seen in many of his other poems. I suppose that's what makes Ginsberg great, every collection offers a little something different. If you like Howl, buy this collection immediately!

What is the true job of a poet and artist? As on answer on could says that his job is to linger the pain of suffering. The poet becomes a man who brings water to the one who suffers, brings understandment, and widens the picture of reality. This is on of the importent things Kaddish is about. Allen Ginsberg wrote this poem to his mother who became insane during his childhood. During her periods of sanity she brought and taught him importent values, things to live for, political point of vievs and understandmens, which gave him perspectives for the rest of his life. The poem is also a great political statement against the existensial order, normality conserned. It shows us the political implications of Naomis madnes. The poem makes clear that her madnes has a connection with the order of modernity in capitalist America. At the same time whe are shown the human experience of lolines that comes out from being left off with the label mad. The sad and unbearebel feelings of guilt and anger felt by Ginsberg himself. An over it all something more, something beautiful about the human relation of love between mother and child which is flaming strong trough all this horrible prospects of shame and suffering. At the end of the poem and in the begining, Ginsberg is dweling with the question of the death of his mother. For him it was in on sense a relief, but at the same time is was his greatest loss, and the ambivalence of this question goes trough the hole poem.