Customer Reviews

Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems

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This book has so many wonderful poems in it. Kaufman's poems draw from so many different sources, making the poems so applicable to so many different poeple's lives. I especially recommend this collection for those who love the retelling of biblical stories!

Shirley Kaufman is an unjustly neglected poet. She's been publishing deep, rich, satisfying poetry for decades now. Some of her poetry is personal, some reflects on Biblical figures and on life in Israel, and some on her own vision problems. She is blind now, or nearly so.

This volume reaches back to her earliest published work, and tracks through her first marriage, her love for her second husband (an Israeli scholar), her move to Israel, her changing relations with her daughters, and her non-obvious, non-trivial reflections on the Middle East. And she does it all in beautiful language that uses but does not showcase poetic technique. There's humor here too, though not often.

So if you are interested in meditative and narrative poems that stay with you long after their surface appeal dissipates, this is the volume to start with. Then go on to her more recent works.