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Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein

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This comes from the back - jacket of the book. "The book contains about one hundred poems selected from Glatstein's past fifty years of publishing. In addition there are fourteen uncollected and untranslated new poems. The translator(Ruth Whitman) has provided a brief introduction to Glatstein's life , work and poetic technique and has supplemented her translation with essential notes and a complete bibliography of works by and about the poet.

Jacob Glatstein came to New York from Lublin, Poland in 1914 at the age of seventeen.He has played a major part in American- Yiddish letters since then, not only as an outstanding poet and one of the founders of the early New York introspective school of poetry, but also as a novelist, essayist and critic."

Glatstein wrote in Yiddish a Yiddish which was for him a symbol of the world left behind in Eastern Europe , the world that would be destroyed by the Nazis.

Here is a poem of his from the section entitled ' Memorial Poems'

TO A SISTER FAR AWAY

I send you a word, as a bow sends an arrow.

Your frightened braids

are younger than your eyes.

Your cheeks are sick,

You write me a thousand letters in your mind

and erase them with a smile.

You grow every day with the grass

but for me you're still

a medallion around my neck ,

to remind me.

And I , wonder of wonders

am not far from you, not near,

but separate, terribly separate.