Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Great Regulars: There is a certain resemblance between

Samuel Menashe and his near-contemporary, Paul Celan. The scale, the intensity, the Jewish consciousness are a significant shared inheritance. Menashe does not write about the Holocaust, except, perhaps, indirectly in a searing quatrain called "Daily Bread", but he is at times elegaic and always concerned with mortality, recalling in early poems the hardships of his own military service in Europe during the second world war. Overall, however, he seems less haunted by historical trauma than by the ordinary sorrow and fragility of the human condition.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Twilight by Samuel Menashe

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