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5.0 out of 5 stars
endorsements, July 25, 2007
This review is from: The Promised Bride (Paperback)
In her startling cycle of *marriage* songs, Jehanne Dubrow brilliantly weds epithalamion to elegy to engender epiphany; her delight in the pleasures of love with her need to bear witness; and her awareness that *there*s nothing riskier than joy* with her realization that *The beautiful is often made / from blood* and *destruction hurries from nowhere.* To questions of how post-Holocaust writers can represent what confounds comprehension, how poets can elegize victims of the Shoah illuminating mourning as an effort without closure, this poet*s hybrid bride Shulamith, knowing the *other won*t / be reached,* responds with her own query: *Should I wear ash instead of white*?* Dubrow has earned the transgressive genius of her poems and discourse with her forbears and their kindred concerns through her craft*s attentive wildness, her renewals of received form and content, her erudition and implication of self. Her struggle with the *pornography of pain* asks that we struggle too, while in awe of what she accomplishes here.
--Yerra Sugarman
**
Fresh and searing as a new fire*s first bright flames, these gorgeous poems startle, seduce, and sustain. Jehanne Dubrow*s use of traditional poetic forms counterpoints and enhances the radical approach she takes to the Shoah. In her deep embrace of Shulamith, she marries herself to the darkest and most daunting epoch in world history. Her groom is the Holocaust, and she breaks the glass of form to free the fire of her vision.
--Charels Ad*s Fishman
A fine line keeps poetry that would engage the Holocaust today from edging into banality and worse. Jehanne Dubrow risks writing at that edge, and stays honest not banal. What's more, the formal turn her poems take, *the tight / ring of my hands,* gives us more grasp rather than less *after Auschwitz.* I'm grateful for The Promised Bride, facing the *broken world* as it does.
--John Felstiner has published Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, and co-edited the Norton anthology Jewish American Literature.
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