- Hardcover: 387 pages
- Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (June 1967)
- ISBN-10: 0374223807
- ISBN-13: 978-0374223809
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 15 x 4.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 703 g
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The impossibility of poetry, Sep 4 2010
By Thomas the Obscure - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: O the Chimneys Selected Poems, Including the Verse (Hardcover)
This is not something one merely reads for the pleasure or leisure of literature. Where speech and hope became impossible, Nelly Sachs stared with angelic, orphan eyes ("through the black folds of night") into the hopeless abyss of the death chambers and gathered, both tenderly and damningly, words that just as radically confront us today. Her poetry is a poetry of those murdered many who "might have plucked stars from the sky". Yet she dares not speak for them, but for their tragic, inviolable absence. This is literature belonging to a remainder that should not be, words that arise from the impossibility of speech. Poems such as You Onlookers pierce our complacency over the increasing political use of racism and anti-immigration more than any radical leftist tract can, making me at least no longer complacent. For this racism - be it against the Roma in France or boat-people in Australia - shares the same roots and is permitted via the same complacency as that which stood by and allowed Nazism to grasp the imagination of the German nation.How can one even attempt to review these poems without reducing their force and the space from which they arise to mere literary history, which is to say to a discourse that constrains them and the unthinkable horror of the holocaust to a mere genre or tradition. One must read them and have the courage to be rent by them, for they rend like no poems i have encountered before. They reduce one to tears and make forgetfulness impossible. As the tangible memory of the Holocaust slowly fades with the death of the generation of survivors, perpetrators and onlookers, it is time we returned to Nelly Sachs' poems so we can see with sober senses what we, as humans, are capable of, and what we are culpable for if we remain complacent onlookers to the continuing injustices humans inflict on one another, whether in the name of nationalism or blatant xenophobia, today.
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