Charles Reznikoff Click here to see other works by Charles Reznikoff

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 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