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Lightning and Ashes

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One critic dubbed Guzlowski as one of the "great recording angels" of
our age. This is apt praise for a true poet whose words are simple,
straightforward, and sing with raw power. Guzlowski's parents met in
Hitler's labor camps and survived to build a life out of "lightning
and ashes." This book is his testament to them.

In the prologue poem, "My Mother Reads My Poem 'Cattle Train to
Magdeburg'" the poet's mother shares a few of her memories, but only a
few:

Even though you're a grown man
and a teacher, we saw things
I don't want to tell you about.

Guzlowski describes his mother as "the poet of dead ends, old despairs/written in whispers..." His father is "a man held together/with stitches he laced himself."

This is a masterful work, poignant and beautiful. Highly recommended.

I read John Guzlowski's collection The Language of Mules a couple of years ago and was very pleased to find this collection. He is a very talented poet who should be more widely read and appreciated. The Language of Mules explores the experiences of his parents in the Nazi camps during WWII, a theme which Lightning and Ashes continues to explore, and also his family's experiences on first arrving in America. The images can be stark and dreadful - they are also unforgettable - but there is a lyricism and beauty that makes these multi-stranded in their depiction of this world.
Just to give a flavour of the writing - an extract from I Dream of My father as He Was When He First Came Here Looking For Work:
'Remember this: this is what war is./One man has a chicken and another doesn't/One man is hungry and another isn't/One man is alive and another is dead./Isay, there must be more, and he says/"No that's all there is. Everything else/is the fancy clothes they put on the corpse.

Lightning And Ashes is not an easy book. Like "lightning," it lights up the sky in shocking flashes. Where it lands it may burn what it strikes, leaving ashes in its wake. Death by war, torture, famine, depression: these are the topics relentlessly faced by the author, himself tragically familiar with these experiences through his parents' survival in World War II. In the opening poem, his mother says "Even though you're a grown man/and a teacher, we saw things/I don't want to tell you about." Well, this poet wants to tell you about them. It's worth listening.

John Guzlowski has presented us with a book of poems based on his family's harrowing life in the Nazi concentration camps and their subsequent move to the United States, forever tattooed with the horrors of the war experience. The reader begins to look for the reasons for the author's parents confinement - the were Christians, not gypsies, not radicals - and we must turn to the explanation the writer gives for the truth: ' I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.'

What flows from the pages of this book are exchanges of words an creation of memories shared by the author's mother and father about these experiences. Guzlowski's poems are clear, uncluttered by needless metaphors or superimposed styles of writing. They simply speak to us of the horrors experienced and the aftermath of lives forever changed.
What the War Taught Her

My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper. and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don't pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.

or from the conversations with his father he writes:
What My Father Ate

He ate what he couldn't eat,
what his mother taught him not to:
brown grass, small ships of wood, the dirt
beneath his gray dark fingernails.

He ate the leaves off tress. He ate bark.
He ate the flies that tormented
the mules working in the fields.
He ate what would kill a man

in the normal course of his life;
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.

In his slow clumsy hunger
he idid what the birds did, picked
for oats or corn or any kind of seed
in the dry dung left by the cows.

And when there was nothing to eat
he'd search the ground for pebbles
and they would looses his saliva
and he would swallow that.
And the other men did the same.

Poetry so seemingly simple expresses more anguish, more ache, more compassion than a hundred thick historical novels about the war. The final long poem 'The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald' is unbearably painful to read, but read and remember it we must so that this can never happen again. Grady Harp, May 11

I didn't know what to expect when I opened this book of poems. What I discovered was poetry which was powerful, disturbing and emotionally overwhelming. John Guzlowski has managed to share with the reader, through his poems, the horrors, deprivations and cruelties that his family endured at the hands of the Germans during World War II and afterwards the indignity and hardship of being displaced persons, forced to make a new life in a new country, the US. What stayed with me was the thought that this family, and others like them, would have the burden of their unhappy memories with them forever. It was heartbreaking.The author was able to convey so much, so compassionately in these poems. Quite extraordinary. A stunning book. I loved it.

Funneled from the cries (both silent and loud) of the thousands, the millions who were the holocaust... these voices rise and call to us, "Remember, remember -- never forget!"

How this poet, removed from the actual experiences, yet bound by blood, could ever convey with such simplicity (artfully) this undeniable horror of life gone impossibly wrong is a wondrous feat. A mark to be seared permanently into the social consciousness, and never erased from history.

Again, and again, one asks: "How could this be? Or have ever been?" We, whose lives are blessed with food and shelter, endless comforts of tv and personal vehicles plush as small houses on wheels, with a forever plethora of non-stop music, and wondering what to buy at the mall -- oh, how spoiled we are!! And yet, we too, carry in us similar hearts as of the enemy... waiting perhaps to erupt, flare up again... at what instigation? It is simple: what was done was human against human. The grief only waiting to reappear in the future; though I pray never to see it.

This book, this reminder, this poet. Not to be forgotten easily. These memories cloaked forever in pain, "and how pain is like the night that never seems to end."

We must make note. Weep with them.
Promise... never again.

(Buy this. And pass it on.)