Darkling - Softcover

Rabinowitz, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971031045 ISBN 13: 9780971031043

Publisher: Tupelo Press, 2001

Synopsis

In this stunning follow-up to her prizewinning debut collection (At the Site of Inside Out), Anna Rabinowitz has created a braided and woven language from the turbulence of multiple voices in the act of finding themselves.
Darkling is a book-length acrostic sequence a poem of accretion, of fragmented self and culture. Seeking its own process and form, it assembles narrative by way of antiphony, counterpoint, meditation, chant, repetition and epistle.
How does a contemporary poet speak in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Is it possible to evoke, perhaps even reactualize, through language, rhythms, and imagery, intimations of the past when factual details are largely lost? Can new constructs of language be generated within the constraints of a received form?

Anna Rabinowitz unflinchingly takes on these questions as she looks back on the ruptured history of the 20th century. Drawing on literary roots of Thomas Hardy's ""The Darkling Thrush"" and the ancient acrostic form, she has shaped an utterly original, deeply personal work which is both armature and repository for an emotionally charged language called upon to articulate that which cannot be fully spoken.
With Darkling, Anna Rabinowitz brilliantly demonstrates that one can, indeed, write poetry after the Holocaust.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Rabinowitz's work has appeared widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, and Doubletake. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, and in The KGB Bar Reader. She edits and publishes the nationally distributed literary journal, American Letters & Commentary, and is a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America.

Anna Rabinowitz's most recent volume of poetry is The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders (Tupelo Press, 2006). Her book-length acrostic poem, Darkling: A Poem, also available from Tupelo Press, has been adapted into an experimental, multi-media music theater work by American Opera Projects and had a limited run from February 26 through March 18, 2006 at the 13th Street Theatre, NYC, with a gala opening night on February 28, 2006. Excerpts from this theater work, along with panel discussions, were presented at the Guggenheim Museum in November, 2005. Rabinowitz's other books include At the Site of Inside Out, which won the Juniper Prize.

From the Inside Flap

In this stunning follow-up to her prize-winning debut collection, Anna Rabinowitz has created a braided and woven language from the turbulence of multiple voices in the act of finding themselves.

Darkling is a book-length acrostic sequence—a poem of accretion, of fragmented self and culture. Seeking its own process and form, it assembles narrative by way of antiphony, counterpoint, meditation, chant, repetition and epistle.

How does a contemporary poet speak in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Is it possible to evoke, perhaps even reactulaize, through language, rhythms, and imagery, intimations of the past when factual details are largely lost? Can new constructs of language be generated within the constraints of a received form?

Anna Rabinowitz unflinchingly takes on these questions as she looks back on the ruptured history of the 20th century. Drawing on literary roots—Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and the ancient acrostic form—she has shaped an utterly original work which is both armature and repository for an emotionally charged language called upon to articulate that which cannot be fully spoken.

With Darkling, Anna Rabinowitz brilliantly demonstrates that one can, indeed, write poetry after the Holocaust.

Reviews

Anna Rabinowitz, editor and publisher of American Letters and Commentary, won the Juniper Prize for her debut, At the Site of Inside Out. She follows up with the book-length poem Darkling, investigating her family's experience in the Holocaust via a fragmentary recollections and textual reclamation, looking for "the way back to raw footage." The book's short, unnumbered sections jump from tercets of long lines, to prose passages, to segments that all but ignore the hegemony of the left margin, to unmaskings of pseudo-scientific theoretical constructions, which cannot compete with the fact that "hundreds of Jews were laid up in a grid-like pattern.... wobbly reliefs of bodies on/ Cobbled stone." This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Rabinowitz won the Juniper Prize for At the Site of Inside Out (1997). In her second book, a long, elegantly structured, and timely poem of loss and remembrance, she is archaeologist, elegist, and historian. Her inspiration is a family archive, a shoebox full of old photographs and letters, and the shards of memories shared by relatives who escaped the Holocaust. Add to that the poet's deep affinity for "The Darkling Thrush," a poem by Thomas Hardy marking January 1, 1900, the start of a new century that proved unprecedented in its mechanized violence and megatragedy. One hundred years later, at the bloody start of another confounding era, Rabinowitz muses on displacement and the fracturing of language and self, and mass murder and the guilt and grief of the living, in a piercing and powerful incantation in which the first letter of each line spells out Hardy's poem. This demanding acrostic formula creates a profoundly resonant overlay of two crucial sensibilities: his a celebration of unforeseen hope, hers a promise never to forget. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971031045
• ISBN 13: 9780971031043
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 85