As with my previous Peter Handke post, I’m sharing enough of this remarkable collection by Samuel Menashe to give a sense of his work without giving away too much.

I first encountered Menashe several years ago, when I volunteered to record books for the Colorado Talking Book Library. My first assignment was unenviable: a rather standard textbook focused on reading and interpreting poetry. The poems were a joy to read, but the prose—not so much: a fairly turgid mixture of academic jargon and a focus on effects rather than pleasure, insight, and inspiration—the main reasons anyone bothers to read poetry.

My second assignment, my salvation, was this very book by Menashe—a challenge for someone like me, whose own poetry typically has a narrative root, however tenuous. Menashe’s short, spartan lines forced me to slow down in order to let the subtle resonances between word and word, word and meaning, meaning and meaning, acquire the necessary volume and weight. His poems flirt with aphorism but most often approach wisdom literature—tightly cadenced irruptions of clarity, radiant with joy even when the emotion is dark. Menashe is in the tradition of Blake, as he himself averred, and DIckinson, certainly—a tradition that extends through him to poets such as Robert Lax, Robert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker, and Kay Ryan.

Yet Samuel Menashe is always himself, a true original. Enjoy!

***

My angels are dark
They are slaves in the market
But I see how beautiful they are

p. 79

In Memoriam

       I

You had your say
Said what you saw
That day I stood by
Your bed to draw you
Out of your silence
Your head in profile
Pillowed, your brow
Your unfailing eye

       II

Now he lies dead
In a white shroud
Eons behind
His closed eyes
Bear him out

       When my father was dying he said, “I feel receded into the distance . . . All of my life my spirit has been in a race with my body and now my spirit has overtaken my body.”

p. 32

Using the window ledge
As a shelf for books
Does them good—
Bindings are belts
To be undone,
Let the wind come—
Hard covers melt,
Welcome the sun—
An airing is eno0ugh
To spring the lines
Which type confines,
But for pages uncut
Rain is a must.

p. 131

Inklings

Inklings sans ink
Cling to the dry
Point of my pen
Whose step I mouth
Not knowing when
The truth will out

p. 187

Descent

My father drummed darkness
Through the underbrush
Until lightning struck

I take after him

Clouds crowd the sky
Around me as I run
Downhill on a high—
I am my mother’s son
Born long ago
In the storm’s eye

p. 170

The hollow of morning
Holds my soul still
As water in a jar

p. 89