Josephine
Singer"Proverbs are true / but not quite / true enough."
Josephine Singer writes in "The Surprises." This is not
a proverb but the beginning of a poem. All of the poems in this
book seek to say what is true enough, what is truer even than proverbs
are. Singer's proverbial insight, like Kafka's, describes the reality
behind things, in a spare and stark place that is not for us. Reality,
like a poem, is a corridor between dark and dark, that leads at
last to a "true recess," emptiness and void, "not
a soul in sight." But still in the darkness there are circles
of lamplight, places of rest. "What but a desire to stay here
would have made me come to this desolate place?" asks Kafka.
We too want to stay for a while, learn for a while, in the desolate
places Singer shows us and of which she somehow manages to make
a sojourn -- a true enough home, even in the corridor.
Josephine Singer's Corridor, more even than the work of Paul Celan,
seems to me poetry absolutely in the spirit of Franz Kafka. The
nearest affinity I can find to her superbly spare meditations is
in the amazing translations that Celan did of a number of poems
by Emily Dickinson. Again, like the strangely sublime Celan, Singer's
work moves me by its indirect yet surpassingly poignant avoidance
of all obvious pathos. So original is Corridor that some of these
reveries carry the mark of a possible permanence.
-Harold Bloom
Josephine
Singer's poems have appeared in The Southwest Review and in the
Library of America volume of American Religious Poetry.
$24.00
Josephine
Singer"Proverbs are true / but not quite / true enough."
Josephine Singer writes in "The Surprises." This is not
a proverb but the beginning of a poem. All of the poems in this
book seek to say what is true enough, what is truer even than proverbs
are. Singer's proverbial insight, like Kafka's, describes the reality
behind things, in a spare and stark place that is not for us. Reality,
like a poem, is a corridor between dark and dark, that leads at
last to a "true recess," emptiness and void, "not
a soul in sight." But still in the darkness there are circles
of lamplight, places of rest. "What but a desire to stay here
would have made me come to this desolate place?" asks Kafka.
We too want to stay for a while, learn for a while, in the desolate
places Singer shows us and of which she somehow manages to make
a sojourn -- a true enough home, even in the corridor.