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PRAISE FOR FROM THERE TO NOW |
Forward Natalia Zaretsky writes: But both long and short memories fade like the calligraphy of curls behind a speedboat. again she writes: Memories don't age---we are young inside them. From There to Now is the work of a woman who has discovered poetry late in her life and turned these strands into the strings of her musical instrument. The tone of these poems moves us in its doubleness, its autumnal mixture of joy and sadness, a tone deeply true to the situation of a woman much of whose life is over, its loves and successes flown, gone, and yet has found in poetry the way to sing them and so to bring them back to life, both for herself and for her readers. Sad sweet as her tone may be, though, I think the sweetness, the joy predominates, plays the melody line in the book, if I may return to the musical metaphor one more time. What remains with me, the resonant overtone, after reading her collection is one of blessedness, the sense of a woman vibrantly grateful for having been twice born, in the sense that she's lived two lives, first as a professor of Physics in Russia who was able, when her political and religious situation became too onerous, to escape with her teen-age daughter to the United States where she found freedom and a career as a computer programmer, and second as a scientist who's found her way to art, a "double double", so to speak. So I commend this book to you, its prospective reader. Its writing is mature, poetry of memory, loves, of politics, Judaism, and of art, it is painting, music, poetry, a book that ripens, sweetens, as we turn its pages. I think the poems go well together in their tone and quality. Poetry Flash |
