Customer Reviews

Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, Expanded Edition (American Poets Project)

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I first became truly aware of the poetry of Samuel Menashe from a lecture given in Jerusalem by a young scholar, Jessica Sacks, who is writing her Ph.D. on Menashe, and the Hebrew poet, Yehuda Amichai. She read a number of extremely brief poems which the members of the audience took intense interest in, and found layer after layer of meaning in.
Menashe is a poet's poet if one thinks of poetry as an art of condensation, of making maximum meaning in minimum space. His poems can be a few lines though often they reach ten or so. The lines too are short and often rhyme. Each word and even each syllable count. There is at times with all the multiple meaning, with all the implication upon implication a friendly kind of humor. Though he is alone and says he now believes he should have made a family he does not seem desperate or lost. Instead there is a certain optimism , a looking up , a kind of rising movement at the end of many of his poems.
Menashe writes about himself, his body, what he sees in the little space of his apartment and in his own small world. He writes occasionally about the war he was a part of, and a good many of his poems relate to the Bible, and the Jewish tradition. Clearly there is something of Proverbs in his work, and he is a kind of 'wisdom- poet'. Emily Dickinson comes to mind for first comparison. The brevity and the assonances, the aphoristic quality of her lines, the paradox and probing are qualities Menashe shares with her. But Menashe's language is far more down home, and colloquial. I find many of his lines memorable and he is the kind of poet who I think will live through many memorizing the poems. Here is the title poem of an earlier Menashe collection.

"The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him"

The poem is epigrammatic and a kind of puzzle. It is a concise and intense desciption of aging and death, a revelation of what will happen to all of us.

Menashe gives us a small text, a few words and draws us to read and reread the work. Camus said that Kafka's genius was in his leading us to reread in this way. And the gift of Menashe's poetry will certainly be given more greatly to those willing to give it time, and know it from depth to greater depth.
There are two clips of Menashe reading his poetry on YouTube and they show him to be not only a wonderful reader, but a warm, intelligent, humorous, modest and quietly ironic person. And this adds to the sense of how valuable the Poetry is.

A recent essay titled "A Deeper Consideration" by the poet, essayist and journalist, Clive James explores the virtues of concision, reflection, and thought in poetry as opposed to mere wordy surface glitter or confessional self-expression. James discusses the works of the American poet Samuel Menashe (b. 1925( to illustrate his claims of what is valuable in poetry. Here is a short poem by Menashe titled "Beachhead" that James carefully discusses.

"The tide ebbs
From a helmet
Wet sand embeds"

Menashe served as an infantryman during WW II at the Battle of the Bulge. Other than this poem, Menashe wrote little about his war experiences. Yet. James properly observes that "there is a whole war" in these tight three lines. James continues: "[The poet] makes his war a nation's war. The deeper consideration is that he was one among many, and, unlike too many, he lived to speak. That he speaks so concisely is a condition of his testament: consecration and concentration are the same thing. This is a world away from the expression of the self. This is bedrock."

Born to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Menashe described his poetical influences as the short poems of William Blake and the Hebrew Bible. He was an obscure figure in American poetry until the Poetry Foundation established a "Neglected Masters Award" for Menashe on the occasion of his 80th birthday. At the same time, the American Poets Project, part of the Library of America, published this volume of Menashe's "New and Selected Poems" in 2005, with a short essay by Menashe, quotations from various poets on his work, and an introduction by Christopher Ricks. In 2008, the American Poets Project edition was expanded to include ten additional poems. I am using the 2008 edition in this review.

Menashe's poetry is short, deeply thought through, and filled with meaning. It doesn't categorize well as either modernist or traditional. The poems are generally in brief lines with every word, and the form, telling. The poems often rhyme in part and make great use of alliteration, homynyms,and suggestion. Some of the poems celebrate the everyday. They frequently are set in New York City where Menashe has lived in the same unpretentious walk-up flat since the early 1950s. But many of the poems are rural, set in woods, fields, or near the water. Death, including the poet's pending death (Menashe is still active), his friends, and his mother's is a preoccupation. Love and love affairs are described, if only elliptically. Some of the poems are whimsical. Most of poetry reaches out beyond its few words to show a concern for spiritual questions.

Here is a poem titled "Windows: Old Widow" which several contributors to the American Poets Project volume use to illustrate the character of Menashe's art.

"There is a pillow
On the window sill --
Her elbow room --
In the twin window
Enclosed by a grill
Plants in pots bloom
On the window sill"

I want to quote two poems out of many that I particularly liked that I have not seen referred to by other writers on Menashe. The first, set in New York City, as is the above poem, is titled "Tenement Spring".

"Blue month of May, make us
Light as laundry on lines
Wind we do not see, mind us
Early in the morning"

The second poem is untitled and is part of a series of little poems that comment upon Biblical passages.

"Leah bribed Jacob
With mandrake roots
To make him
Lie with her

Take my poems"

Menashe's poems reminded me of the short poetry of Charles Reznikoff (1894 -- 1976). Like Menashe, Reznikoff was born to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Reznikoff wrote in obscurity for years in a style that was both concentrated and highly personal. Like Menashe, Reznikoff lived in New York City, and many of his poems have an urban setting. And both writers show a strong Jewish influence even though neither appears traditionally religious.

Readers interested in modern poetry that is slightly off the beaten path will love this collection of Menashe's poems. As with much else, the Library of America is to be commended for publishing this volume and making Menashe's work available.

The essay by Clive James discussed in this review is taken from the September 2010 issue of "Poetry" magazine.

Samuel Menashe died on August 22, 2011.

Robin Friedman

I discovered this poet through a blog called "37 Days." So glad I looked for his book and ordered it: it's fabulous! His work is so spare yet so profound. I find it hard to describe or write about poetry (well, I used to do it when in college in the dark ages...) because it speaks for itself.

I recommend this book and this poet with no reservations. If you are a poet, you will love it. If you love poetry, you will appreciate this stunning work.

Well I must say that it is about time this poet, Samuel Menashe is receiving some of the recognition in this country he so richly deserves. Long known in Britain and other European countries, this American poet, who has lived most of his life in New York has had, for me, a bewildering problem having his work published in the United States, and certainly he falls into the category, as awarded by the Poetry Foundation - American Poets Project, as the winner of the Neglected Masters Award.

It is quite difficult to find a pidgin hole in which to thrust Menashe's work into and I hate to try as I am quite averse to stuffing anything but pidgins into pidgin holes. His writing has been described as "spiritual," which indeed it is, but it certainly cannot be categorized as religious. His poems have been noted to be "Zen Like," which I suppose indeed they are. One of the problems of using either spiritual or Zen like is that both word mean so many different things to so many different people. Zen has been used to describe everything from golf to motorcycle repair and beyond, and spiritual is such a overused "buzz word," that I hate to apply it to a work that is...well, so different.

I suppose I will use "contemplative and profound," which seems vague enough for my purposes in this review. I suppose the reader of Menashe's work can pick Zen like, spiritual, contemplative, profound, or if all else fails, make up their own descriptive word or description. Which ever you pick, I am sure it will work for you.

I do know that the author of these poems is a word miser, or perhaps it would be better stated that he gets more mileage out of a single word than most poets get out of five or six pages. Sparse, bare to the bone, total impact, stunning and well...thoughtful....you really have to read this stuff to fully grasp the wonder of this writer's words and thoughts. In 1960 he wrote:

Always

When I was a boy
I lost things -
I am still
Forgetful -
Yet I daresay
All will be found
One day

In 2006 he wrote:

Always

When I was a boy
I lost things -
I am still
Forgetful -
Yet I daresay
All will be lost
One day

Autobiography:

Who is mother
Of more than one
Is not the same
As the mother
Of an only son
Who never became
Anyone's father -
still only a son
As an old man -
What I have not done
Made me who I am.

It is said that some of this mans work is of the rhyming mode and that is so but do take note that we never ever see silly rhyming couplets set mindlessly to paper. Rather than "rhyming" I prefer to use the word "rhythm" which I feel is a better description. There is a rhythm to this work and it is most noticeable, as with all poetry, when read aloud. Rather amazing stuff, really.

Even though the author was a rifleman in the heat of things during the Battle of the Bulge, we are not talking any war poems here. On the other hand, no human I know could live through an experience like that and not be affected in some way and indeed, this does show thorough here and there in his poetry. The issue of death is well addressed, but on the other hand, so is life.

I first became aware of Menashe's work in the late 1960s, or perhaps it was the early 1970s...years now blur for me and I have difficulty pinpointing a specific chronologic time and rely more and more on events to place things. I do know that when I first heard his work I was selling a pint of blood a week as we were quite broke and the good people at the blood bank were paying me fifteen dollars; a fortune for us at the time. During one of our weekly get-togethers, a young lady friend of ours read several of his poems from a book she had purchased somewhere in Europe and I remember that it had quite an impact on not only myself, but all the others that were together at that time. Since then I have run across bits and pieces of his work scattered here and there, but always in small doses. You cannot imagine the thrill I had when I came across this wonderful volume...At last, a full helping! It has been wonderful!

Do yourself a big time favor and go out an buy a copy of this one, or check it from the library, or go ahead and steal one (as long as it is not my copy), it will be will worth your time and any risk that may be involved. I find this work is best read in the quite of the night or before a long run or bike trip...it gives you something to mull over and it is quite bewildering what this mans words can conjure up in your mind.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

Menashe is getting at last the recognition so long overdue. His poetry combines wit with precision in its lean spareness. I hope that many more will discover this master.
Bruce M. Shipman