Charles Reznikoff

Softcover, 128 pages ISBN 1-57423-208-8 $15.95 Holocaust Black Sparrow is proud to restore to print one of the great long poems of the late 20th century, Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, originally published in 1975. Reznikoff’s subject is one people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribulnal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He lets the terrible history unfold – in history’s own words. Reznikoff’s technique, says David Lehman, “contradicts the very faculty of understanding. He lets reality speak for itself, lets it state the externals of the thing or event, and leaves unspoken (or edits out) the emotions, which the reader may be counted on to provide for himself.” Few readers will forget the emotions they bring to Holocaust. Softcover, 400 pages ISBN 1-57423-203-7 $21.95 Hardcover, 400 pages ISBN 1-57423-204-5 $45.00 The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918–1975 edited by Seamus Cooney Click here for an online preview of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff It is in his short poems that Reznikoff excels; his best poems read like quotations out of masterpieces. He has seen visions...and this is the essence of a poet. – Malcolm Cowley Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrants. He was an original, a blood-and-bone New Yorker who walked the city’s waterfronts and breathed the life of the Jewish tenements into a lifetime of remarkable poetry. Black Sparrow Books is proud to publish his complete shorter poems – all of his poetry except the book-length works Testimony and Holocaust – scrupulously edited, with notes, by Seamus Cooney. Reznikoff’s poems [are] solely concerned with lucidity of vision. Naked of ornament, clean of illusion, they show us “the iron scythe in the grass that stops for no flower.” – May Swenson I am enthralled, captivated, swept away. He speaks of a New York I know chiefly from my father and grandfather, a city of horse-drawn trucks, sea smells, the early subways and elevated trains, tenements still lit by gaslight, men wearing eye-shades, suspenders, sleeve garters, and shiny collars...Deep in his Jewishness, [he describes] gentleness, loneliness, patience, hope, and underneath all the slow pounding of history. – Hayden Carruth The short poems...reveal Reznikoff in the fullest command of his art – brief narrative vignettes, mostly of urban and proletarian lives, in which the Objectivist procedures of restraint, seeming passivity, and precise specification are transferred from nature to the sphere of human actions... with stark effectiveness. The more striking of them seem to me quite as fine as anything of the sort that William Carlos Williams wrote. – Robert Alter   Hardcover,  350 pages ISBN: 1-57423-035-2 1997, $31.95 Softcover,  350 pages ISBN: 1-57423-034-4 1997, $18.95   Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff 1917-1976 letters from Charles Reznikoff edited by Milton Hindus This landmark volume of correspondence by the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) sheds light not only on the difficulties of an artist trying to keep afloat in the modern, materialistic society of the heady 20's and 30's, but also on the relation of poetry to a wider culture during this eventful and turbulent period. One of Reznikoff's main correspondents is the teacher, writer and Zionist activist Marie Syrkin, who married Reznikoff in 1930. During their courtship Charles reveals his ambivalent feelings regarding a poet's ability to win his family's bread: "I expect my love for you to feed my work -- and my love for my work to feed you." Another recipient of Charles' letters was his friend Albert Lewin, the film producer, writer, and director.  Working for Lewin in Hollywood, Reznikoff first limns im his letters to Syrkin a glamorous, "Arabian nightish" world but concludes that the life of the poet will remain his chosen one: ". . . My instrument is the poem - and of course I rarely succeed. But I try to write some verse every day. . . " This wonderful "Self-portrait of the Poet" gives an invaluable account of an important young artist eking out a living in a storied era.