Reviewers have praised the exciting combination of passion, wisdom, and historical perspective present in this new poetry collection by Vera Schwarcz. Sam Hamill writes as follows: “These deceptively simple, direct poems are ‘organic’ in the best sense, drawing deeply from roots in Jewish, Chinese, and other ancient traditions and arising as naturally as a deep breath at the first light of dawn. They are a pleasure.” And Charles Adés Fishman adds this: “Vera Schwarcz’s words are precise brushstrokes that reveal and illuminate what she loves, celebrates, mourns, and desires. For this poet, the past does not recede into the realm of forgotten history but rushes forward into the present. In this engaging and elegant book, Schwarcz wields the ‘chisel of remembrance’ that, delicately, delicately, finds its way to what is sacred, necessary, andin the right handslasting.” Stanley Moss finds the work of Schwarcz to be “poetry of a very high order, simultaneously informed by English, Chinese, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Hebrew, and Jewish religious tradition. I place English first only because the book is written in English. But I hear Chinese, a language I do not know, as dominant while post-Holocaust emotion is ever-present... This politically charged poetry with its abhorrence of suffering also teaches a profound love of nature, while providing the simple pleasures Auden required.” And this from Michele F. Cooper: “Into the corpus of Vera Schwarcz’s shimmering poetry and meditations comes this outstanding book of new poems, Chisel of Remembrance, which offers the reader a combination telescope/microscope as the poet ponders Chinese, Jewish, and personal culture. Again and again it offers lines I want to read aloud, enjoying their chemical mix of feeling and intellect. You never know what’s around the next corner: an art collector, blinded clocks, wild chirping, alphabets, cherry bark, date fronds, the scent of peace, or Confucius himself... This bright and eloquent book will keep Vera Schwarcz in the light for many years.”
Vera Schwarcz was born and raised in Cluj, Romania, where she began her explorations of poetry in several languages. Her mother tongues include Hungarian and Romanian, with Yiddish, German, Hebrew, Russian and French added along the way. After emigrating to the United States in 1962, she pursued degrees in East Asian studies and history at Vassar, Yale and Stanford. A member of the first group of exchange scholars to be sent to China in the spring of 1979, she has returned to Beijing repeatedly during the past three decades. All along, her corpus of scholarly writing has been accompanied by the publication of poems in several languages in the United States, Europe and Asia. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Schwarcz has made the quest for remembrance a central theme in all her works. Her writing has been nominated for the National Jewish Book Award and has been accorded several major grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Vera Schwarcz is serving as Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University and holds the Freeman Chair in East Asian Studies. She lives with her husband and children in West Hartford, Connecticut.
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