Last Poems

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Celan's poetry reflects the emotional and spiritual scars he suffered at the Nazis' hands. After both his parents were murdered in concentration camps, he spent World War II in a forced labor camp; he died a suicide in Paris in 1970. Taken from his last three verse collections published in Germany, Last Poems contains short, fragmentary, free-verse explorations of a semiabstract universe in which a shattered soul confronts sounds, violent motions, stones, empty space. ``In the gap of the calendar/ the newborn/ Nothing/ rocks him, rocks him.'' Memories of his Holocaust experiences are embedded like bullets in stained glass. Even when Celan does not deal directly with the Nazi years, the pressure of the past weighs heavily; he warns a crocus, ``You need every blade.'' The translators' use of a plethora of compound words (pre-flood, hatchet-swarms) to cope with Celan's German coinages is understandable but not always effective. A critical apparatus would have been helpful. Most of the poems in this bilingual edition have never before been translated into English. (June 15)

Library Journal

This volume contains over 100 poems, most previously untranslated, from Celan's last three collections: Lichtzwang (1970), Schneepart (1971), and Zeitgehoft (1976). Celan's verse derives from and reflects his experiences as a Jew in Europe during World War II and, afterwards, as a Jew writing in German. His poems express a private symbology; though their individual power is unmistakable, their meaning is elusive: ``Gone into the night, complicit,/ a star-/ porous leaf/ instead of a mouth:/ something remains/ for wild wasting,/ treeward.'' Almost all of the poems here are spare, hard-edged nuggets or fragments of feeling: ``Cut the prayer-hand/ from/ the air/ with the eye-/ shears,/ lop its fingers off/ with your kiss . . . .'' For all foreign poetry collections. Robert Hudzik, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.