The poems of Charles Reznikoff : 1918-1975 / edited by Seamus Cooney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Reznikoff, Charles, 1894-1976.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Cooney, Seamus.

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xiii, 445 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston : David R. Godine, 2005.

Summary:

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), the son of Russian garment workers, was an American original: a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from the Bronx to the Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He wrote personal memoirs, family history, and tenement tales in verse. He wrote narrative poems based on Old Testament sources. Above all, he wrote spare, intensely visual, epigrammatic poems, a kind of urban haiku. The language of these short poems is as plain as bread and salt, their imagery as crisp and unambiguous as a Charles Sheeler photograph. But their meaning is only hinted at: it is there in the selection of details, and in the music of the verse.

Reznikoff was sincere and objective, a poet of great feeling who strove to honor the world by describing it precisely. He also strove to keep his feelings out of his poetry. He did not confess, he did not pose, he did not cultivate a myth of himself. Instead he created art-an unadorned art in praise of the world that God and men have made-and invited readers to bring their own feelings to it.

In an age of ephemera, of first drafts rushed into print and soon forgotten, Reznikoff's poetry is a sturdy, well-wrought thing-"a girder, still itself / among the rubble." A timeless testament-impersonal, incorruptible, undeniably American-it will survive every change in literary fashion.

Contents:

Rhythms (1918) 3

Rhythms II (1919) 11

Poems (1920) 19

A Fourth Group of Verse (1921) 29

A Fifth Group of Verse (1927) 53

Israel (1929) 63

King David (1929) 77

Jerusalem the Golden (1934) 93

In Memoriam: 1933 (1934) 119

Separate Way (1936) 153

Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941) 175

Inscriptions: 1944-1956 (1959) 217

By the Well of Living and Seeing (1969) 249

The Fifth Book of the Maccabees (1969) 339

Jews in Babylonia (1969) 349

Last Poems (1977) 359

Appendix Obiter Dicta 371.

Notes:

"A Black Sparrow book."

Revised ed. of: Poems 1918-1975 published in 1989 by Black Sparrow Press.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 433-434) and index.

ISBN:

1574232045

1574232037

OCLC:

61162231

Publisher Number:

9781574232042

9781574232035