Dead Men's Praise - Softcover

Osherow, Jacqueline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136540 ISBN 13: 9780802136541

Publisher: Grove Press, 1999

Synopsis

With Dead Men's Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection yet. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante's terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, while always keeping the voice of casual conversation. In the book's centerpiece, "Scattered Psalms," Osherow takes on the Hebrew psalms, the lyric heart of both the English and Jewish literary traditions out of which her writing comes. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure lyric inspiration of biblical poetry, these poems range from Italian hill towns to Los Angeles contemporary art installations to the vanished Jewish world of the Ukraine, from imaginings of the future to recovery of the past. Her distinctive voice becomes a seemingly impossible fusion of the sublime and the down-to-earth.

About this title

About the Author

Jacqueline Osherow directs the creative writing program at the University of Utah.

Reviews

Showing an easy mastery of the terza rimaADante's form of choice in the CommediaAOsherow's fourth collection also displays significant familiarity with the sonnet, villanelle and other forms. But unlike many other explicitly formalist poets, Osherow has sacrificed aristocratic pace to accommodate the present day's taste for kitsch, democratic accessibility and the dropped domestic fourth wall. With an ear attuned to the best qualities of Jewish humorAthe mating of metaphysical concerns with those of daily living, the ability to spin off on seemingly endless tangents ("But did I tell you? I spoke Yiddish at the AcropolisA"), the direct addresses to a mensch-like GodAOsherow juxtaposes strict meters and odd facts and observations, at times suggesting Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron": "Besides, I'm not sure God much cares for piety;/ my guess isAsince David was his favoriteA/ That He's partial to passion, spontaneity,// And likes a little genuine regret./ True, David lost his ill-begotten childA/ But what did the pious ever get?" The central themes of the book may not, at first glance, seem unusual: looking at Renaissance art and desiring an equal verbal language, asking where is God in the world, and how He could have let the Holocaust happen, etc. But Osherow's direct grapplings with the tradition, however funny and chatty, have grave underpinnings: she's concerned with the history, marginality and the threatened existence of the Jewish people. Such cares, combined with her formal versatility, make this a drama of the negotiation of cultures on a grand scale. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Osherow's poems are formally precise yet conversationally casual, theological and droll. Her persona is valiant and witty, scholarly and mischievous, almost as though she's posing as a clever young girl pulling on an elder's coat and asking why. Why were her people chosen, and what exactly for? Why didn't God prevent the Holocaust? As Osherow chronicles travels in Italy and literary expeditions in Dante and the Russian poets, all the sorrows of history, especially of our cruel century, rise cawing like startled crows. Then, in the glorious "New Tanager/New Song," she offers a shrewd paean to evolution--of the perceptual and spiritual as well as the physical--noting that "One era's commonplace is another's sign." There is only change, she implies: progress is a fantasy. Art, religion, and science all coalesce in new configurations in the magnificent "Scattered Psalms," in which Osherow conducts a supple and radicalized form of Talmudic study, parsing Hebrew psalms for insights into the nature of God and our perpetual longing for "something that will last." Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802136540
• ISBN 13: 9780802136541
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96