Customer Reviews

Silk and The Ragpicker's Grandson (Short Works Series)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This small but powerful book of poems constructs the poet's genealogy out of parts of his and his wife's ancestry. Drawing first on an ancestor of his wife who had been a silk merchant in China in the nineteenth century, Bert Stern writes from the merchant's perspective in an epistolary manner that captures both the exotic aspects of a place strange to him at first and his down-to-earth clarity. The second sequence of poems also borrows voices from the past, this time from the author's Jewish past in Moldavia. This is a story of emigration from the terrors of the pogrom and immigration through Ellis Island to America. Between the two parts, we are given an almost mythic conjunction of two prominent "Americas." The author's ability to inhabit the minds of these pasts is a gift not often found among poets, and the poems are lit with a gentleness his characters must have passed on but did not often know. The third section, made up of two poems in Stern's own voice, are perhaps a culmination of these histories. Certainly they contain some of the best poetry in this book and more than suggest a powerful future for this generous-hearted poet.